In „Introduction“ we showed you just enough to place your lesson file to get started. This sections give you all the details how files and directories are set up.

We will write INSTALLDIR whenever we refer to the directory Solfege is installed in. The exact location differ from operating system to operating system, and can be found by selecting Help → File locations and then lookup «Solfege installation directory». Example of locations:

Please notice that INSTALLDIR is not necessarily the top directory where all files belonging to Solfege is installed. Different operating system place files differently. For the purpose of this document INSTALLDIR is the directory containing the solfege/ subdirectory containing all the python modules that composes the program and the exercises/ subdirectory that contains all the lesson files.

Solfege allow for the user to create exercises (and soon also exercise modules written in Python). These should not be saved in INSTALLDIR because then they will be lost on upgrade.

The directory to save the lesson files you write yourself depends on the operating system you run, and on the locale settings (language). In this document we will write USERDATA whenever we refer to the directory found if you lookup «Solfege user data» by selecting Help → File locations. Your files should be saved in directories below USERDATA. Example values for USERDATA:

Lesson files and front page files are grouped together in subdirectories below USERDATA/exercises. You can have as many subdirectories as you like in USERDATA/exercises. Each file that matches USERDATA/exercises/*/* will be read by the program and used as a front page file if it has the correct format. Other files will silently be ignored. This means that you can have more than one front page file in a subdirectory, and extra files, like README and COPYRIGHT files are ignored.

Lesson files should be saved in a directory named lesson-files in the same directory as the front page file is saved. So if you create some exercises with jazz progressions, you might have this file structure on your computer:

USERDATA/exercises/jazzprog/page.txt
USERDATA/exercises/jazzprog/lesson-files/prog1
USERDATA/exercises/jazzprog/lesson-files/prog2
USERDATA/exercises/jazzprog/lesson-files/prog3

There is one folder name below USERDATA/exercises that is special. In addition to what described above, all lesson files in USERDATA/exercises/user/lesson-files will be shown when you select User Exercises on the File menu. This was done to make it simple to just write a lesson file, drop it in a directory and use it.