The Pro Menu

“Giocoso Pro” is the name given to a set of features that allows 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.

Switching 'Pro Mode' on involves editing your Persistent Configuration File (see the Administration menu, Option 2) and filling in the IP address of the remote Giocoso Pro server to which all client devices will send their play histories. Only when you've switched on Pro mode in this way will the Pro menu appear on the main program interface.

The Pro menu thus handles what you do after taking those two first steps of Giocoso Pro Server creation and client-Pro Mode-switch-on. 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: