Giocoso is, first and foremost, a classical music player... so the Play Music menu is pretty much the meat-and-potatoes of the entire program! Almost all the options found on this menu will initiate music playback (the exceptions are a couple of menu options that deal with playlist housekeeping matters).
The various music-playing menu items controls what music Giocoso will play, by altering the source of the music it knows about. Most commonly, Giocoso will use a music database to tell it what FLAC files exist and where they can be found on disk: Giocoso will query that database and pick one of those files to play, more-or-less at random. However, you can also make specific queries of that database using your own selection criteria and Giocoso will then play the results of your queries. Finally, you can simply 'point' to a folder of music on your hard disk and tell Giocoso to 'play that', which it will then do, quite happily.
Whenever you make a manual selection of music to play, you can store the results of that selection into a text file called a playlist. Playlists can then also become a source of future Giocoso play selections. Since a playlist is simply a text file, you can create your own playlists in a simple text editor and feed that to Giocoso as a source of plays, too.
I must emphasis, however, that practically nothing on the Play Music menu will work until you have created a music database: If you haven't already created a database, therefore, please skip to the Database Management menu options to do that first! Also: please note that there can only be one Giocoso session playing music at a time, though you are free to launch multiple Giocoso sessions to do other things (like running reports or editing the Persistent Configuration file) whilst another is playing music. Most of the menu options on the Play Music menu will simply be silently inoperative if acting on them would cause two sessions to start playing music at the same time. Indeed, if you launch a second Giocoso session after one is already playing music, the entire Play Music menu will be off-limits: no menu items at all will be displayed.
Links to a detailed description of each menu option are listed below:
[ User Manual Home ] | [ Play Music ] | [ Database Management ] | [ Reporting ] | [ Administration ] | [ Control ]