When you start Steam Jukebox Player for the first time you will see something like the picture to the right.

The main track list window is divided into three parts;
The top pane will display a list of recordings available to play.
The middle pane will display notes about the selected recording.
The bottom section will display some details of the recording being played. Also in this area are the player controls and tabs for navigation.

Your first job is to load a Steam Jukebox Album so click on the Options tab.

Album files (with the extension .sdb - Steam Jukebox Database) may be found on your hard disk, or more usually on a CD or DVD.
If none are visible you will have to navigate to the appropriate folder to find one.
When you have found the one you want select it and press Open.

This is the part of Steam Jukebox that you will use most.

In the top pane you will find a list of recordings available in the album you have just loaded.
Click on a recording. Just a single click this time.
In the middle pane some descriptive notes should appear.

If you double click on a track (or press the Play button) the selected track will begin playing.

At the bottom you'll see the track title, date and the name of the album along with the filename.
Underneath the player controls you'll see a progress bar move across and above that the elapsed time and length of the track (00:12/02:36 - 12 seconds into a 2 minute 36 second track).

There are two other tabs;

Let's start by clicking the Search tab.

Each album will be supplied on a CD or DVD.
A CD will hold around 150 recordings while a DVD might have 1000 recordings on it.
With so many recordings available you are going to need to use the Search tab to find the recordings that you want.

Enter the text or number that you want to find in the search box and click the Search button. You can search for any matching words or have all the words match or you can search for an exact phrase.
If you entered '5305 departing from York' and selected Any word you would find any recording with '5305' or 'departing' or 'from' or 'York' in the title. This would find lots of recordings as the words 'from' and 'departing' are quite common. With All words selected, every word would have to be in the title but could be in any order. This would find fewer recordings and would probably be more useful. Exact phrase would only find recordings of 5305 departing from York!

You can also select recordings with a particular code. The code will usually indicate where the recording was made; MLS refers to Main Line Steam, SVR to Severn Valley Railway - I'm sure that you will be able to work these out for yourself.

Having found recordings of interest there are a few things we can now do with them from the Search tab.

The simplest thing to do is just play a recording. Double click on the title or click the play button.
We can also add an individual recording to the playlist. Right click on the recording and you'll find that you have the option to 'Add to playlist'. You can also right click recordings in the main track list and add them to the playlist that way.
Alternatively you can copy all the search results to the playlist.
Search for some suitable tracks (if you have the sample album, search for 'sample') and click the 'Copy all to Playlist' button.

Which will take us to the Playlist tab where we can see the recordings that were listed in search results.

Once again the simplest thing we can do here is double click on a recording to play it (or click the Play button).

Instead, make sure that the first recording is selected then click the 'Play PlayList' button. If you click the Play button in the main controls only the selected track will be played, not the whole list.

So now we are back in the main Track List but all the recordings in the Playlist will now play in the order they are listed and you will be able to read the notes about each track as they play.

There are other things that you can do from the Playlist so click on the tab to go back there.

If you look at the buttons you will see that you can clear the playlist. You can save or load a playlist. You can also delete an individual track from the playlist - try right clicking on it.

You can Export the recordings in a playlist.
If you have a portable mp3 player you can copy the recordings to a folder on you hard disk and then transfer them to your player. You can also have a text file with the notes about each track.
Please remember that the recordings are only intended for your own use!

Well, that's just about it.

Except that there are couple of other things worth mentioning;

If you don't like the appearance of the programme have a look on the Options tab where you can change the colour and size of text. You can always return to the defaults by pressing the appropriate button!
Also from the Options tab you can merge albums together.
If you copy albums to your hard disk you can merge the album database files together to make one big one and have all the recordings available at once.
Lastly, while playing a recording if you click on the progress bar below the player controls you can skip backwards and forwards through the recording.

Have fun!