Microsoft Music Central was a music encyclopedia on CDROM produced by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, similar to their Cinemania

Microsoft Cinemania

Microsoft Cinemania. Interactive Movie Guide was a reference and educational application produced by Microsoft and published annually beginning in 1992. The software was mainly a database of films, in a similar fashion to the Internet Movie Database, and gave descriptions of the films and who...

 product and part of the Microsoft Home

Microsoft Home

Microsoft Home is a defunct 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 Windows and Macintosh personal computers...

 range. The software featured a selection of biographical articles from the Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music a spin off of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music

Encyclopedia of Popular Music

The Encyclopedia of Popular Music was 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.-History of the encyclopedia:...

 written by Colin Larkin (writer)

Colin Larkin (writer)

Colin Larkin was the editor and founder of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, described by Jools Holland as 'without question the most useful reference work on popular music' and by The Times as 'the standard against which all others must be judged’....

; along with album reviews from Q

Q (magazine)

Q is a popular music magazine published monthly in the United Kingdom.Founders Mark Ellen and David Hepworth were dismayed by the music press of the time, which they felt was ignoring a generation of older music buyers who were buying CDs — then still a new technology...

Magazine.http://www.monitor.ca/monitor/issues/vol3iss1/newstuff.html The software also included still images

Image

An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...

 and full-motion video

Video

Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...

clips and featured online updates.

Users had the option of taking an informational 'tour' 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. This automatically directed the user to particular articles, and played samples of music.

Users could also browse by artist, album, and genre, or search for particular keywords. There was also a gallery feature to view portraits, album covers, video clips and song clips.