Welcome to the Musical Discovery Help System

To make your Musical Discovery experience pleasanter, context-sensitive help is available where appropriate. Some screen have detailed instructions embedded, for others, you can hit the F1 function key,  and the appropriate user help screen will be displayed.  Read Keyboard Shortcuts to learn about the other function keys available.  To find out the special meaning of specific terms used by Musical Discovery, see the panel on Definitions.

A few screens have a specific command button labelled "Help", clicking on this will also bring you to the appropriate help screen. Once in this user help sub-system, you can browse through the other help screens by using the contents panel on the left. To leave any help screen, you can click the pink 'Back' button in the top left corner, or hit the Esc key (Escape key).

The first screen you see after starting Musical Discovery is the "Front Screen". Hitting F1 from this screen will bring you this home page of the help system. There is a standard windows menu across the top of the screen, which remains the same on all other screens as well. This provides access to every feature in the Musical Discovery System.  It contains drop-down menus, with the following headings:-  File   Edit   Create   Practise   Theory     Mid features      Musicology   Windows   Help.

As a quick simple alternative to the menus, there are 3 big command buttons on this front screen, which are:-

At the foot of the Front screen is the PlayBar.  This provides an easy way to play music stored in the Musical Discovery database. If all the buttons except New are disabled (greyed out), this means no tune has yet been loaded from the database into memory. Click the New button to open up any music file. Then you can use the Play, Pause, Stop, and other buttons much in the same way as you would operate a CD, DVD or cassette tape player. A PlayBar appears on many other screens when needed. Read Keyboard Shortcuts to learn about the other function keys for starting and stopping tunes..

There is a table of contents in alphabetical order, displayed in the panel on the left hand side of all the help screens. This makes it easy to look up other help topics.

There is a Microsoft  Access database associated with Musical Discovery, which stores tunes, themes,  and full length pieces of music, together with catalogue data about each piece of music, famous composers, instruments, and more.  After initial installation, you will be connected automatically to the default database,  named  MusicalDiscovery.MDB,  and this will be stored in the same directory in which you have installed the  "Musical Discovery" software. To see your current database connection, see the About Musical Discovery screen, accessible from the help menu. To change the path to point to one of your own databases, go to the  MENU  File -> Options

In order to hear music from this system you need either an internal sound card, or an external sound module connected with a USB or Midi cable.  To see which devices are available on your computer, and select one of them,  go to the  MENU Midi Features -> Midi Setup   This can also be reached from File -> Options


UserHomePage.htm   29/12/06 at 06:24