Microsoft Music Central is a discontinued music encyclopedia on

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

produced by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

, similar to their Cinemania product and part of the Microsoft Home range. The corpus includes a selection of biographical articles from the Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music a spin-off of the

Encyclopedia of Popular Music ''The Encyclopedia of Popular Music'' is an encyclopedia created in 1989 by Colin Larkin. It is the "modern man's" equivalent of the '' Grove Dictionary of Music'', which Larkin describes in less than flattering terms.''The Times'', ''The Kno ...

written by

Colin Larkin Colin Larkin (born 1949) is a British music writer. He founded and was the editor-in-chief of ''The Encyclopedia of Popular Music''. Along with the ten-volume encyclopedia, Larkin also wrote the book ''All Time Top 1000 Albums'', and edited th ...

, album reviews from '' Q'' Magazine,Newstuff
/ref> and still images and full-motion

video Video is an Electronics, electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving picture, moving image, visual Media (communication), media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, whi ...

clips. For a time, Microsoft made available monthly updates for those with Internet access. The encyclopedia also allows browsing by artist, album, and genre, searching for particular keywords, and viewing portraits, album covers, song clips and video clips in the gallery. Music Central includes informational 'tours' led by the recorded voice of an artist (or an imitation of their voice, in the case of Little Richard) on their own musical genre. The tour directs the user to particular articles and media.

References

* he title of this piece was corrected in a "For The Record" clarification on page 68 of the September 16, 1995 edition, explaining that the publisher of the CD-ROM was Microsoft and not "Macintosh"* * Music Central Educational software for Windows {{music-software-stub

See also

References