Preparation:

Before you can play a dance, you have to get the music and cue cards into the computer. Cue cards can be entered using a word processor or scanned in. Getting the music in is a little more difficult at first, but becomes easy with practice. You can either buy it in digital (MP3) form, or record your own. If you have more than a few records, you will almost certainly want to do your own recording.

DanceMaster expects to find all your cue card files in one directory (folder) on your computer. It is best to keep them under your DanceMaster folder in C:\DanceMaster\Cue Cards.

Similarly, all your music files should go into C:\DanceMaster\Music FIles, your voice (cues) files into C:\DanceMaster\Voice FIles, and your full cue sheets (fine prints / step cues / etc.) into C:\DanceMaster\Full Cues.

You will probably want to record the cues for at least some of your dances. One way is to record the music in "stereo" and put the music in one channel (right or left) and the voice in the other, the way it is often done with mini-disks. A better way is to record the music in one file, then record the cues in another, separate, file. (See Recording Cues.)

The first step in recording music on your computer is: Setting up your sound card:

Then we will talk about Recording the Music, Recording the Cues and of course we will go into creating Cue Cards as well.