Introduction to the Pro Menu
"Giocoso Pro" was the feature introduced to Giocoso in Version 3.30, allowing a local Giocoso installation to communicate with a remote MySQL database -and thus share its own play history with that of other devices who were running Giocoso. In this way, statistics would accurately reflect what was being played on all Giocoso devices, not just one. Similarly, you could make notes about a recording on a laptop and then review them later on a PC: data again being shared between devices, thanks to storing it in a common, shared database that all clients could access equally well.
Implementing Giocoso Pro means first creating that shared Giocoso Pro Server -and there's separate documentation covering that. After that, each client device (i.e., a local installation of standard Giocoso onto a PC or laptop, for example) needs to be pointed to the new, shared server: that's done using the Administration menu, Option 2 and is again documented elsewhere. Until you have done this configuration, your Giocoso installation runs in 'non-Pro' mode and does everything locally as it did in versions prior to 3.30... and, crucially, the Pro menu remains hidden and non-functional. Only once the Giocoso Pro Server's IP address is set in the persistent configuration file does the Pro menu become visible and operative.
The Pro menu thus handles what you do after those two first steps of server-creation and client-configuration. Putting it simply, four of the Pro menu options are all to do with pushing a local client's data to the remote Pro server, so that it comes to know about previous plays and what recordings are available to play in the future. Other options generate reports or data extracts from the remote Pro database. Another option allows you to view notes about recordings that may have been created on multiple Giocoso clients. Finally, there's an option to switch the operation of the Reports menu from purely-local to purely-remote mode: when you run the aggregate statistics report, for example, do you want to see the statistics that only this PC has generated, or do you want to see the ones that all your Giocoso devices produce when aggregated? You can flip back and forth between either reporting mode, as the mood takes you.
The Pro menu therefore is important in initiating Giocoso running in shared-database, Pro mode. It also has a couple of potentially useful features that only make sense once that shared-database environment has been created. Links to a detailed description of each menu option are listed below:
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