Microsoft Music Central is a discontinued music encyclopedia on CD-ROM produced by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

, similar to their Cinemania product and part of the

Microsoft Home Microsoft Home was a line of software applications and personal hardware products published by Microsoft. Microsoft Home software titles first appeared in the middle of 1993. These applications were designed to bring multimedia to Microsoft Window ...

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 Kn ...

written by

Colin Larkin Colin Larkin (born 1949) is a British writer and entrepreneur. He founded, and was the editor-in-chief of, the ''Encyclopedia of Popular Music'', described by ''The Times'' as "the standard against which all others must be judged". Along wit ...

, album reviews from '' Q'' Magazin

and image, still images and full-motion

video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syst ...

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"* *

References

See also