The Activities menu
To begin a Practica Musica activity you choose an activity from the Activities menu.
The Activities menu displays the current contents of your Activities folder, and can be organized any way you like. If there is a folder inside the Activities folder, that folder's name will become a popup menu title in the Activities menu, and the folder's contents will be listed in the popup menu. If even that folder includes other folders those, too, will get their own popup menus. This way you can open any activity in the folder without having to use the Change Activity Folder command.
As it comes from Ars Nova, the activities folder currently contains 17 activities that follow the order of those in previous versions of the program, then a number of popups containing, for example, activities especially designed for with Exploring Theory.
If you want to you can create folders inside the Activity folder that have names suiting your own purposes, and then move activity files to them. Your Activities menu will display the new arrangement next time you start the program.
For example, you could make a folder for each of several students, and place in those folders activities intended for those particular students. You could make copies of activity files that are needed by more than one student. For example,
Folder name: Frank
Contents: Pitch Reading, Begin Reading Rhythm
Folder name: Nancy
Contents: Pitch Reading, Interval Spelling
You could organize the folders by class:
Folder name: Music 101
Contents: Pitch Errors, Melodic Dictation
Folder name: Music 201
Contents: Atonal Dictation, Interval Series
Or by weekly assignments:
Folder name: September 2-9
Contents: Lines and Spaces, Key Signatures
Folder name: September 10-17
Contents: Reading Accidentals, Begin Reading Rhythm
You could organize by topic:
Folder name: Beginning Ear Training
Contents: WholeStep/HalfStep, Pitch Matching, Interval Ear Training
Folder name: Rhythm
Contents: Begin Reading Rhythm, Rhythm Reading, Reading Syncopation
Remember that the names of activities that appear in the menu are not the actual file names of each activity file; the names you see in the menu are the internal names of each activity as defined in the Name and Menu Titles window in the activity editor. Folder names in the activity menu, however, exactly match the folder names in the activity folder.
The Change Activity Folder command is needed only if you need to access activities that are kept in some other folder outside the Activities folder. You'll see a file dialog in which you can choose an activity anywhere on the computer, and after you choose it the program will rebuild the Activities menu to match the contents of the folder that contains the chosen activity.