Apple Accessories, now at StaplesAdvanced Batch Converter
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Or, Learn More About Advanced Batch ConverterFull user review
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"bad customer service, problems with command line interface and GUI"
Pros
We purchased this software for its command line reference and after some trials and tribulations I was able to get it work, somewhat. It compressed our tif files nicely (I was using g4 compression, whiteiszero, grayscale) but it worked only on single page documents in the command line (see rants below). The Gui was nicely layed out and I suspect it works well on many other formats. The negative column though will make these pro's seem trivial.
Cons
The cmd line provides no means of overwriting the same file or doing recursive directories that the gui supports. In the end I was forced to use dos to augment this program's cmd line.
When running the gui I was trying to compress 200k files and found that it would only support 10k files before continuously throwing out of memory errors. The problem was that the program didn't wait for memory to free up before proceeding but rather it just failed over the next 100 files very quickly before recovering. The files that didn't get converted are now mixed with the ones that did. The pc had to be reset to fix the memory errors.
My command line that I was running was abc.exe (file) /grayscale /tiff=(4,0) /Convert=(File) and that was it. (I tried adding the dpi switch and failed miserably making all images unreadable.) Mymultipage tif's had all pages after the first page removed. The gui has a means of providing multipage support but not the command line. The result of that is that now I am restoring my original files (in my test environment I failed to notice that multipage's were incorrect after cmd line running when I specifically tested multipage support in the gui sucessfully...my fault there, yes, but the lost time is worth mentioning here.
The support was the worst part of this ordeal though. I sent in an email request (preferred method according to the site as I hadn't purchased the higher levels of support) and waited the normal 48 hours turaround. What I was looking for was an answer to the memory errors, the dpi resolution that didn't work in the cmd line and to see if maybe their was a cmd line reference I could use to find such missing cmds the gui offered, such as directory recursion and file overwrite options and to see if I missed something. On day three I contacted the mfr and left a vm. (The support # goes straight to vm btw, no live support) It's been two weeks now and I haven't received a response to either method despite them now having my phone # and email to reach me.
buyer beware...
