A track opens on its Listen tab with its cover on it, and plays when you press Play. There is one Jukebox, because there is one pair of speakers and one listener: any track, album or folder of music, wherever you see it, offers Play with Now, Next and Last under it, and they all feed the same queue. A music drive that has been scanned can be opened as a library—every track at once, or by artist, album or genre—and an artist inside it opens as the folder it is, because it is a folder. Tags and covers can be changed for any number of recordings at once, and the Edit tab records sound and cuts, fades and mixes it, as a project that publishes back as an ordinary recording.

Listening

A Track

Double-click a track and it opens in the View with its cover on it, cued but not playing. Press Play. A track isn't started for you the way a film is, because a track is opened to be seen—its picture, its title, its facts—and a program that starts making a sound of its own accord is a program that gets closed. MP3, FLAC, WAV, M4A, Ogg, Opus, AAC, WMA, AIFF and a good many rarer kinds open this way; anything else goes to whatever Windows would have opened it with.

Under the cover are the title, with the artist and album beneath it, and the same transport bar a film has: a rail to move through the song, with the time above it; back five seconds, play and pause, forward five; then CC for lyrics, the speaker, a volume rail and full screen. Left and Right skip five seconds and Space plays and pauses, when the player has the focus or the pointer. Starting a track quiets anything else that was playing, the Jukebox included, and there is one volume and one mute for every player. Pause is a short fade, not a cut.

The cover is the first of these it finds: a picture inside the track's own tags; a picture in its folder named cover, folder, albumart, front or album; the same in the artist's folder above; or the program's own music picture. CC shows lyrics when there are some: a .lrc file beside the track, a .txt beside it, or its LYRICS tag. Timed lyrics run over the bottom of the cover, the current line bold; plain ones go in a box. The Properties panel on the right-hand strip has the rest: track, title, artist, album, year, genre, length, bit rate, frequency, bit depth, channels and quality.

Scores

A MIDI file is a score, not a recording: it says which notes to play, not what they sound like, and a player has no orchestra of its own. So Desktop Minder has it performed first, once, by FluidSynth with a SoundFont for its voices, and then plays the performance like any other recording. A score has only a Listen tab, no tags, and one extra command, Convert to FLAC, which keeps that performance as a file beside the score. Without FluidSynth and a General MIDI SoundFont, the command is grayed and says what it's waiting for, and the Properties panel says what is missing.

The Jukebox

The Jukebox is a tab on the right-hand strip, and whichever desktop you're on borrows it. You fill it by dragging tracks, albums or folders into it, from a pane, a folder or File Explorer, or by right-clicking them and choosing Play:

• Play > Now replaces the queue with this and plays it.
• Play > Next puts it straight after what is playing.
• Play > Last puts it on the end of the queue.

Never by clicking: a click is looking, and looking at an album must not quietly line it up. Its rows show song titles and album covers rather than file names, because a playlist showing file names is showing its own plumbing. Drop in an album you have in more than one form and it plays the best copy of each song: lossless before lossy, then the better grade, then the higher bit rate. Double-click a row to play it; drag rows to reorder them; Del takes the chosen ones out. Beside the usual buttons for the previous and next song are Shuffle, Repeat (off, one track, all) and a bin.

Under the player, Never, Auto and Always and a slider say how songs join: from two seconds of silence between them to two seconds of overlap, with Auto deciding from the two songs' genres. The queue's right-click menu has Loop and Volume Leveling—Off, Track, Album or Automatic—which use the loudness tags that Normalize > Loudness writes. An arrow beside the picture opens the player in the View, as a tab of its own, with the queue staying in the strip. The queue is remembered from one session to the next, down to the place in the current song, and nothing plays until you ask.

And only one thing sounds at a time. Start a film, a song in the View, a video on a web page or a clip in the Wikipedia panel, and whatever else was playing goes quiet. Putting a page or a film out of sight doesn't silence it, though: you might be following a podcast on a page you've moved away from.

Music Libraries

A drive or folder laid out the usual way, artists and then albums, can be made into a library: right-click it and choose Scan Music Library. It asks first, reads every track's tags into one small file at the top of the music, and shows its progress in a window that you can stop between artists without harm. From then on, opening it gives you the library rather than the folder, and Rescan Music Library reads only the albums that have changed. The library file lives with the music—on the server, if that's where the music is—and each machine keeps a copy of its own, checked against the original no more than once an hour.

A library has tabs along the top of the View: All, Artist, Genre and Album. Each lists every track in the library, with a heading before each artist's, genre's or album's own, and how many tracks it has. Its View menu offers List, List Details and three sizes of icons, where a track wears its album's cover. A search box looks through titles, albums, artists and genres at once. Double-click a track and it opens in the View; double-click an artist's or an album's heading and it opens as the folder it is; double-click a genre's, which has no folder of its own, and it's gathered into one, of shortcuts, that lists and queues like any other. Open Launcher puts the library's artists and albums on the left-hand strip as panes of their own.

Making a New One

New Audio

Choose Document > New > Audio, on the bar of a folder open in the View or of a launcher pane, or right-click an empty place in a launcher pane and choose New > Audio. It asks nothing, and makes an empty FLAC file named Audio- and the date and time. In a launcher pane it opens at once on the Edit tab and its name is ready to type over; in a folder's listing the name is ready and the recording stays closed. The Listen tab of an empty one says "Nothing recorded yet."

Recording

On the Edit tab, the label at the right of the toolbar says Input: and a name. Click it to choose where the sound comes from:

• What you hear, for each playback device: whatever the computer is playing, a stream, a recording, a video. This is what it starts with.
• Each microphone, a webcam's included.
• Only a program's sound, for each program that is making sound just now. Start the program playing first. This needs Windows 10 build 19041 or later.

The choice is yours for this computer; it isn't written into the recording. Monitor lets you listen to the input and watch the level meter without recording, so you can set things right; Record starts a take, and Stop (or Space) finishes it. Windows' own system sounds are switched off while you record and put back when you stop, so a notification chime can't land in the take. A take is laid down at the cursor, or the start of the selection, over whatever is already there, on the first track you've chosen. It is kept whole and unprocessed, as a file in the recording's own folder, and any silence of half a second or more is kept as silence, so the timing is true. A take of zero length is discarded.

Editing

The Edit Tab

The first thing you edit or record turns the recording into a project, which is a folder: your original is kept untouched inside it, with a file of instructions that says what has been done to it, and the takes. Nothing is ever cut out of an original; a cut changes the instructions. To File Explorer it's a folder, but to you it is the recording: same name, same tile. At the top of the Edit tab is a toolbar, and under it a waveform of every track, a line of readouts—the cursor's time, or the selection's start, end and length—a level meter, and a line of notes.

The Waveform

Click to put the cursor, a thin black line. Drag to select a range, which shows as a blue band over the tracks it covers; drag down into other tracks and they join in. Shift and click extends the selection, Ctrl and click toggles a track in or out, and double-clicking selects the clip under the pointer. With the waveform focused, Left and Right move the cursor (Ctrl for a second, Shift to extend), Home and End go to the ends, Up and Down change track and Ctrl+A selects all. The wheel scrolls up and down; Shift and the wheel scrolls sideways; Ctrl and the wheel zooms around the pointer. While playing, the playhead is a crimson line.

Cutting, Copying and Silence

Each command works on every selected track at once, as one step in the history. Delete and Cut take the range out and close up the gap on those tracks only; Cut also holds it. Paste replaces the selection if there is one, and otherwise inserts at the cursor and pushes the rest along; one track's worth goes into each selected track. Copy and Paste work within one recording, not between two. Silence keeps the length. A command that can't be done is grayed, with the reason as its tip—"Select part of the track first."

Fades and Volume

Fade In and Fade Out ramp the selection from or to silence. Volume applies a chosen change to the selection, or to the whole track if nothing is selected. Normalize brings each selected track's loudest sound in the range just under full scale, and says so if there's nothing there to bring up. Each track also has its own Volume slider in its header, from nothing to double, snapping to normal.

Tracks

Each track has a header on the left with its name, M for mute, S for solo, a Volume slider, and for a stereo recording a Pan slider that snaps to the middle. Right-click a track for Rename Track..., Mute, Solo, Move Up, Move Down, New Track and Delete Track (a recording always keeps at least one). Right-click a selection and the menu is headed by it—"0:05.00 - 0:12.50 on Track 2"—and offers the cuts, Fade and Volume.

Trimming by Dragging

Move the pointer to the edge of a clip, within about five pixels, and it becomes a left-and-right arrow. Drag in to shorten the clip, leaving a gap; drag out to bring back what was taken, as far as the sound goes and a neighbor allows. An orange line with a time shows where it will land, and snaps to the selection's ends and the playhead. Esc cancels; letting go makes it one step.

Undo and What Has Been Done

Right-click and open the submenu named for the recording: Undo: Delete, Redo, What Has Been Done—a numbered list in which every step offers Go Back to Here and Take This Step Out, the second grayed with its reason when a later step depends on it—Back to How It Was Opened, and Write the Changes Now. The instructions are saved about three seconds after your last step. Where there is no Recycle Bin, you're asked when you leave Edit whether to keep your changes, and No takes the recording back to how it was last agreed.

Listen to the Result

The Listen tab plays the recording as the instructions describe it, made once by ffmpeg the first time you ask, with a note, Getting it ready to play.... An unchanged recording just plays the file.

Tags... and Publish...

Tags... opens the tag sheet for the project: what the finished recording will carry. Changing them is an undoable step.

Publish... makes the final recording at full quality, in the kind of file the project's name says, with the project's tags and the original's cover, and puts it where the project is. It asks first what to do with the project's folder: Keep the folder, which leaves it beside the recording as Song.flac.bak, or Delete the folder, which goes to the Recycle Bin once the recording is in place. (On a drive with no Recycle Bin, the second button says it deletes it for good, and means it.) If the name is a lossy kind, like MP3, it warns that the file keeps less of the sound than the project has. If anything goes wrong the folder is put back. Edit a published recording whose .bak is still beside it, and the whole project returns. A recording's menu also has Copy ffmpeg Command, which puts on the clipboard the command that makes it.

Everything About the Sound

These work on any recording, or on fifty, from a folder's listing or a pane.

Edit Tags

Edit Tags, on one recording or fifty, opens a sheet in the View with every field the files have: title, artist, album, album artist, track and disc numbers, year, genre, composer, conductor, comment, lyrics and the rest, plus any field you care to add—MOOD, CATALOG, anything at all—by typing its name in the box at the foot and pressing Add. Each is a box you can type in or choose from. Where the files disagree it says < keep >, and leaving it alone leaves each file as it was; the list also offers < blank >. The Cover box shows the picture, with buttons to add one, save it out, or take it off every file, and it takes a new one dropped on it. A lone recording with no tags opens with its title and number already guessed from its file name. There is no OK button: what you change is written a minute after you stop, or the moment you put the sheet down, and only the fields you touched, and only in the files where they differ.

Copy Tags and Paste Tags

These carry one recording's tags, cover and all, to another, or several to several in order—except ReplayGain, which describes one particular recording and means nothing on any other. A recording keeps its own title and track number if it has them.

Set Track Numbers

Set Track Numbers... is Mp3tag's numbering wizard, because that's where people already know it from. It numbers the files in the order the listing shows, so in a folder sorted by None it numbers them in the order you've dragged them. It can begin anywhere, save the total, pad with leading zeros, and do disc numbers, even starting a new disc when the folder changes.

Normalize

Normalize > Filename renames a track from its tags, as [01] First Song.flac, filling in any missing tags from the old name first; names that would collide are left alone, and it tells you. Normalize > Loudness > Track and Album measure with ffmpeg and write ReplayGain tags, which the Jukebox's volume leveling uses; the sound itself is never changed. On a folder it asks first, and shows its progress along the foot of the window, where a click stops it.

Convert To

Convert to makes a copy beside the original in another format: WAV, FLAC, MP3 (at 128, 160, 192, 256, 320 or variable), Ogg Vorbis, Opus, AAC, AIFF or WMA. Any... opens a box with the kind, the quality and where to save. The tags come along, and the cover with FLAC and MP3. If the copy already exists it asks before it overwrites.

Covers and Cells

A picture in an album's folder offers Set as Album Cover, which writes it into every track there. And in a folder listing, a track's number, title, artist, album and album artist can be typed over right where they are, the way Mp3tag does it: select the row, then click the cell again, slowly. Enter writes it into the file; Esc cancels. The Quality column grades every track, from XQ for genuine high resolution down to LQ, by what the recording is rather than by its bit rate alone.

What It Needs

Listening, recording, editing and tags need nothing but Desktop Minder. Convert to, Normalize > Loudness, the Listen tab after you've edited, Publish... and Copy ffmpeg Command need ffmpeg and ffprobe, and a score needs FluidSynth and a SoundFont. Where something is missing, the command is grayed with a tip that says what.

Not Yet

• Bringing an existing sound file into a project. For now the only thing that adds sound is recording, though you can record "what you hear" while something else plays.
• Split, insert, trim to selection, reverse, and effects of any kind—equalizers, noise removal, speed.
• Copying between two recordings, and a keyboard Undo.
• Dropping something onto an open track: it takes nothing dropped on it. A sound file dropped on a video's layers does land in its sound lane, though.