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<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>MegaSeg 1.0 Manual</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgcolor=ffffff> <CENTER><IMG SRC="images/manual0.gif"></CENTER> MegaSeg 1.0 Manual Welcome to MegaSeg! Thank you for choosing MegaSeg music automation software! This quick guide will tell you everything you need to know to get started. However, if you have any questions, please e-mail us for assistance at <a href="mailto:sales@megaseg.com">sales@megaseg.com</a>, or call (877) MEGASEG. System Requirements MegaSeg requires a Mac OS-based computer with a 150 MHz or greater PowerPC processor, running Mac OS 8.0 or later, 16-bit built-in sound, and 11 MB free disk space per 4 minute song. (A 6 GB iMac can hold over 500 songs when dedicated to MegaSeg.) Installing MegaSeg MegaSeg is available for download from our web site (<a href="http://www.megaseg.com">http://www.megaseg.com</a>) which can be unlocked into a full working version. Getting Configured A few adjustments in the Mac OS will make for a better MegaSeg experience. The first steps deal with the Appearance control panel, which can be found in the Apple Menu, under Control Panels. <IMG SRC="images/manual2.gif"> If you’re using Mac OS 8.0 or 8.1, skip this paragraph. In Mac OS 8.5, Apple added sound effects to the mouse and window operations. If you are using MegaSeg in a professional environment (a dance party, for example), you should turn the sound effects off to prevent the bells and whistles from interrupting the music. Open the Appearance control panel, click the ‘Sound’ tab, and select ‘None’ from the Sound Track pop-up list. <IMG SRC="images/manual3.gif"> Because MegaSeg is designed to be used in dark environments, the interface is mainly black and dark blue with light blue text to help prevent eye-strain. With the Mac OS default highlight colors, any highlighted text in MegaSeg will be hard to read. To improve this, change the highlight color to a dark color by opening the Appearance control panel and clicking the ‘Appearance’ tab in Mac OS 8.5, or the ‘Color’ button in Mac OS 8.0. When you see an option for Highlight Color, select “Other...” from the pop-up menu, change it do a dark color using the color picker, and click OK. This will need to be changed back when not using MegaSeg because of an opposite effect with black text on white. <IMG SRC="images/manual4.gif"> The Mac OS 8.0 - 8.1 Appearance control panel <IMG SRC="images/manual5.gif"> The Mac OS 8.5 Appearance control panel NOTE: All the default Mac OS 8.5 highlight colors are light colors because using dark highlight colors with black text produces fuzzy highlights when “Smooth all fonts on screen” is on. The trade off solution is to turn off font smoothing, or switch the highlight color back to a Mac OS default when not using MegaSeg. Now open the Monitors and Sound control panel, also found in the Control Panels folder. Once open, click the ‘Sound’ button and locate the slider for “Computer System Volume”. Move the slider all the way to the right for the best sound output into a sound system (PA). Also set the “Sound Output Quality” pop-up menu, if available, to 44.100 kHz. <IMG SRC="images/manual6.gif"> NOTE: If you are using the computer’s built-in speakers, set the volume to a comfortable level. You can also set the computer volume using the Control Strip, if installed. Starting MegaSeg Once installed and set-up, double-click the MegaSeg program. You’ll be greeted with an intro screen and if it’s your first time running MegaSeg, it will switch to a registration form. Once completed, it will generate a text file of the form for you to e-mail to sales@megaseg.com. MegaSeg then continues to launch, and presents the main interface. <IMG SRC="images/manual7.gif"> The Main Interface The main MegaSeg screen is designed to fill the screen when your monitor resolution is set to 640x480. If you want to see part of your desktop while using MegaSeg, switch to a higher monitor resolution, using the Monitors & Sound control panel, or the Control Strip. NOTE: If you want to work on something else while listening to MegaSeg in the background, use the finder’s “Hide MegaSeg” option under the Application Menu (far right of the menu bar). When you want to see MegaSeg again, select MegaSeg from that same menu. Two lists are displayed on the main screen. The left list is your Song Database. The right list is your Playlist. Above the Song Database, the two ‘text buttons’ are used to select different views of the database. Click “Title List” to toggle between alphabetized titles and alphabetized artists within the category of songs selected. <IMG SRC="images/manual8.gif"> Click the text button “All” to see a pop-up list of categories. Double-click a category to display the songs in that category listed alphabetically, by your choice of title or artist. <IMG SRC="images/manual9.gif"> To the right of the category text button, a number displays the total number of songs in the current category. A number above the Playlist window displays the total number of songs cued-up. The five buttons between the two main lists are used for adding, removing, and moving songs in the Playlist window. If you are using MegaSeg for the first time, you won’t have any songs in your Database, so let’s add a new song now. Adding a new song Put an Audio CD in your CD-ROM drive, click the ‘Add’ button on the left side of the screen, and ‘Enter password.’ should pop-up. <IMG SRC="images/manual10.gif"> For your protection, the Song Database is password protected. In order to add a song, you need to enter Administration Mode. If you’re using the demo, just press Return to use the ‘demo password’. If you’re using MegaSeg for the first time after unlocking the demo, the default password is blank (no text). Just press Return, and the Add Song window will pop-up. (You can change your password using the Change Password button.) Once in Administration Mode, you can use the Edit, Add, and Delete buttons freely. When you want to exit Administration Mode, press Command-M. Now, let’s add that first song... <IMG SRC="images/manual11.gif"> In the Add Song window, type in the Title of the song, the Group or Artist’s first and last name, as well as the Track number you wish to import off the CD. NOTE: If you wish to preview the CD tracks, you can use the “AppleCD Player” from the Apple Menu, or use the Control Strip’s CD Control, if installed. Once you’ve entered this information, click Import CD Track to extract the audio from the CD and save it in a CD quality file. The compression process follows automatically, which can take awhile for slower computers, but should take only a minute or so on a 233 MHz computer. NOTE: The compression ratio is 4:1, which compresses the sound file to 1/4th it’s original size while retaining it’s CD quality sound. While some quality will be lost, MegaSeg has the best sounding compression at CD quality ratios. We have compared many compression algorithms including MP3, and found IMA 4:1 superior sounding to MP3 at 4:1 ratios. In the future, we will expand MegaSeg into accepting multiple sound formats, including MP3. NOTE: The sound files are stored in the Songs folder inside the MegaSeg folder on your hard drive. The filenames are user friendly...simply the title of the song followed by the artist’s name up to 31 characters. If you ever need to find a song in the Finder, open the Songs folder and type the first few letters of the song’s title. It should jump right to it. If you have an audio file already on your hard drive that you wish to import into MegaSeg, click Import File. An open file dialog box will appear allowing you to locate your file. Once selected, MegaSeg will rename the file with the Title and Artist you previously entered, and add it to the Song Database. You must then manually move this audio file into the songs folder. MegaSeg currently accepts standard AIFF or AIFC format audio files. After the compression process is finished, the Edit Song window will pop up asking for more information. <IMG SRC="images/manual12.gif"> Edit Song To set the Seg Time, press the Play Ending button to hear the last :20 seconds of the song. When you hear the point where you want MegaSeg to auto segue into the next song, click the Set button next to the Seg Time text box. If you miss your mark, press the Play Ending button and try again. <IMG SRC="images/manual13.gif"> The ‘play ending’ of song button. You can continue this process for the Intro Time, and Cue-In Time as well. Use the Test button next to the Cue-In Time for previewing the song using the current Cue-In Time. The regular play button will always start from the beginning of the sound file. If you clip the beginning of a song, start from the beginning and try again, or you can manually type in the time values. The format must be “minutes:seconds.tenths” (“0:00.0”). The Volume text box and slider control allows you to adjust the volume of individual songs in the database. Some CD’s are recorded softer than others. Use this control to boost softer songs to match other songs you have added. The default volume is 256. Be careful not to distort a song by cranking it too high. Most often, the default volume is recommended. To set the categories for your new song, click the Category text box. A new window will pop up with a list of categories. Note the options to add and delete category names. To add a category, type the name in the box and click Add. Category names are limited to 10 letters. To delete a category, click to select it from the list, then click Delete. Click on the category you want to choose, or you may put a song in multiple categories by holding down the Command key while clicking the categories (Command-Click). Click OK to complete the sequence. <IMG SRC="images/manual14.gif"> Once everything is set, click Save in the Edit Song window. Back in the main interface, you will see your new song displayed. You can edit the song at any time. Just click it once to highlight it, then click Edit or select File->Edit Song from the menu (Command-E). To delete a song from the song database (and delete the sound file from the hard drive), click the song once to highlight it, then click Delete (File->Delete Song, or Command-D). Searching the Song Database To search the Song Database simply type a keyword in the textbox above the Find button, and press Return, or click Find. The resulting titles will appear in the Database display and the category text button will change to “Matched” followed by the number of matches. Click Find again (or press Command-F) to clear the search results and return to the category display. <IMG SRC="images/manual15.gif"> Adding songs to the Playlist With a few songs added to your Song Database, you can start building a Playlist! A song double clicked in the Database display jumps over to the end of the Playlist, cued up and ready to go. To remove a song from the playlist, double click the song in the Playlist display. You can also use the buttons in between the displays to add and remove songs. The Playlist can cue up to 600 songs. <IMG SRC="images/manual16.gif"> To insert a song in the middle or at the top of the Playlist, first click once in the Playlist display where you want the song to go, then single-click the song from the Database display. Now press the Insert button between the two displays, and the song will insert itself in the Playlist. To move a song around the Playlist, select the song with one click, then use the up and down Move buttons that are between the two lists. At the bottom of the two displays, are buttons for navigating around the lists. The double arrows are used to “page” the displays, while the single arrows scroll the displays one song at a time. Use the TOP, MID, and END buttons to jump to the top, middle, or end of the lists. Note: On the Playlist, the NEXT song is always displayed at the top, so only 4 songs can be seen while scrolling or paging through the Playlist. The Add 5 Random Songs option from the Playlist menu (Command-5) will add 5 songs randomly selected from the current category displayed in the Database. There must be at least 6 songs for this to work because of the “no repeat filter”. This filter takes 75% of the total number of songs available in the category, and scans that many songs from the bottom of the Playlist, preventing any close repeating. For example, if you have 100 songs already cued up, this option scans the last 75 songs of the Playlist to prevent any repeats while it adds the 5 new songs. <IMG SRC="images/manual17.gif"> To clear the Playlist, select Playlist->Clear Playlist from the menu (Command-C). Starting the Playlist Now that you have some songs cued up, let’s start rockin’! Click the Start Playlist button at the bottom of the MegaSeg screen (or from the menu Playlist->Start Playlist, Command-G). Instantly, the first song in the cue will play while MegaSeg counts down the time. Since MegaSeg defaults to Autoseg mode, as indicated by the flashing button on the top right, MegaSeg will autoseg to the next song and fade out the previous song automatically! The default cross-fade time is 2 seconds, but you can change this time in the Preferences (Command-R). You can manually seg at anytime by pressing the Segue button (Playlist->Seg To Next Song, Command-/). This will instantly start the next song and fade out the previous song. The Segue button works in Autoseg mode or Manual mode. When in Manual mode, MegaSeg waits at the end of a song for you to press the Segue button before continuing with the playlist. Once the Playlist is in motion, the Start Playlist button changes to Stop Playlist. If pressed, it will fade out the current song, and halt until you start the Playlist again. Loading and Saving Playlists You can load and save your playlists with the buttons on the right of the Playlist display. The songs in the playlist are stored by name, so if you add or delete a song in the database, there is no problem with matching numbers. The song numbers are for navigation feedback only; they have no attachment to the songs themselves. <IMG SRC="images/manual18.gif"> In the Load Playlist window, there are buttons for Delete, Add, and Load. Either double click the filename, or single-click to select and then click Load to clear the current playlist and load the saved one. If you wish to add the saved playlist to the end of the current playlist without clearing, click Add instead. The Delete button erases a selected playlist. If you load a playlist that contains songs you deleted from the database after the playlist was saved, MegaSeg will alert you of the problem and report how many songs were skipped in the playlist. This number represents the total count of skipped songs. For example, one missing song could be skipped multiple times. The Log File Every time you start MegaSeg, it creates a new Log File in the Logs folder inside the MegaSeg folder. This file will log every song that is played, as well as the time and date it was played. Playlist songs missing from the hard drive will be skipped and marked as such in the log. You can view the current log at any time by clicking the Log button (or Playlist->View Playlog, Command-L). <IMG SRC="images/manual19.gif"> To prevent unnecessary build up in the Logs folder, delete any dispensable logs. For example, sort the list chronologically by Date Created in the Finder, then trash the oldest logs. The Notepad It’s always handy to have a place to type in a quick note or two, right? So we built a note pad right into MegaSeg. It’s nothing fancy, but it does the trick. To view the MegaSeg Notepad, select File->View Notepad (Command-V) from the menu. The End That’s it! We hope you enjoy using MegaSeg. MegaSeg, and the MegaSeg swirl are trademarks of Fidelity Media, Inc. Apple, Macintosh, and Mac OS are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged. Copyright © 1999 Fidelity Media, Inc. </BODY> </HTML>