This happens to me all the time. I use Pear Note to record a meeting, then leave the meeting without remembering to hit stop. A few hours later, I realize that I’ve been recording ever since then. Sometimes I’ve had private conversations that I really don’t want recorded, other times it’s just hours of silence. Early in developing Pear Note I realized this would be a problem.

So, I made a solution. Pear Note allows you to crop recordings (look under the Edit menu). Just play up to the point you want to be the end of the recording (or drag the slider) and select “Crop Recording From Here”. Save your document and the excess recording is no more.

Pear Note documents represent a single note, as opposed to a complete notebook like some other programs. I much prefer this for a number of reasons. It makes it easy to give a copy of a note to someone else, and you don’t end up with giant, unmanageable documents. With a good search capability, it can be just as easy to find notes that aren’t a part of notebooks as notes that are. But there’s one thing that’s always bothered me about having a single note per document file.

I get really annoyed at having to continually pick a file name and folder to save the note. With Pear Note’s search feature, I can throw my notes anywhere and name them just about anything, so I really wanted a way to avoid thinking of a name and folder when saving. So, I created one. I may end up being the only person on the planet to use it, but I think it’s pretty cool.

If you look under Saving in Pear Note’s preferences, you’ll see settings for a default save location, default save filename, and whether you want ⌘S to save to those defaults without prompting. Together, these three mean that you can avoid ever picking a file name again (of course, you can always choose one by using Save As… instead of Save).

Saving Preferences