Tutorial: Saving Your Work in a File

As in any kind of software program in which you prepare a document, it is a good idea to periodically save your work as a backup. This advice is offered mainly to protect you against errors you might make yourself. For example, you might alter the song in a way that you later regret and would like to undo.

Composer's multiple level undo feature, which you have already explored in this tutorial, offers a certain degree of protection against mistakes that you might want to undo.

In addition, Composer has an auto-recovery feature. Periodically (by default every 10 minutes), Composer makes a backup copy of your work. If your system fails, you can return to a recent state of the song, using the Recover Auto-Saved File command in the File menu.

However, the best protection against your own mistakes, or system or software failures, is to periodically back up your work. You have probably already learned the importance of doing this, working with other document editing programs.

Notation Composer and Notation Musician use and share a music file format that includes not only MIDI performance data but also notation data. Normally, you should save the song in the Notation file format, used by Notation Software's Notation family of music software products. A Notation file has the .not filename extension.

To save your work in a file:

Composer will present the File Save As dialog box.

-- OR --

Type CTRL+S, which is the standard Windows shortcut for File Save.

A default directory will be opened. It will be \Program Files\Notation\Songs (or on Windows Vista \Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Roaming\Notation\Songs) unless you installed Composer in a different directory. You can change the default directory, if desired, by navigating to another directory and then setting a check mark by "Set directory as default".

For example, use Twinkle1 as the file name. Composer will automatically add the Notation .not file name extension.