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

 

Unless you’re a better note-taker than I am, you probably end up with gaps in your notes. After a class or a meeting you look over your notes and realize that you didn’t write anything down for 20 minutes. Maybe you were doing the talking at that point so you couldn’t write anything, maybe you zoned out, maybe you dozed off, or maybe you just didn’t think about writing anything down. Regardless, you’ve got nothing for that portion of your notes.

Pear Note is great for this situation, as you can just hit play, click on the end of the notes you did type, and listen to the portion you slept through missed. That may be all you want to do, but Pear Note can also let you update your notes. Just click the “Unlock to modify text” button and you can do just that. Clicking that button turns off the text area’s ability to jump around the recording so that you can add text (or modify the text already there).

When you write text now, Pear Note will record time stamps for that new text just as if you’d written it during the original recording. That means that later when you play it back, you can use your new text to navigate through your recording just like the original text. So, the next time you zone out, take comfort that you can come back and fill in that gap as if you were paying attention the entire time.