Monthly Archives: April 2020

Tempo Counter (Revisited)

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As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things that I find helpful is to have access to a tempo counter that allows me to tap a beat and both measure the tempo and show me the dance styles that fall into that range.  I wrote a version of that for Windows Phone way back in the day.  I’ve had a web version up on the musci4dance site almost since it’s inception.  It seemed like time to do a quick revisit and freshen it up a bit.  I decided to use this as a quick test of the newer technologies I’m starting to incorporate in the site.

So check it out and let me know what you think (here’s some updated documentation as well).  If you were a regular user of the old tempo counter, please let me know if there is anything that you depended on that the new one doesn’t do as well.  And of course, I’m happy to hear about what you think has improved as well as any features neither of them has that you would like to see.

Stay Safe. Stay Sane!

Where is that feature I asked about?

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There are a bunch of features that folks have requested that I am really interested in working on.  These are basic features like adding your own songs, community features like being able to ask what to dance to a song or seeing all of a specific dancer’s recommendations, and practical features like more versatility in exporting search results.

But you may have noticed that I released the last significant new feature last year and overall the evolution of the site has been pretty slow recently.  This is partly because music4dance is a passion project that I manage in my spare time and partly because it’s a big and complex enough project that something breaks for one reason or another and I lose days or weeks of project time just maintaining the status quo.

All this to say that for the past six months, I’ve been spending the bulk of my available music4dance time upgrading the infrastructure so that I can more easily add features moving forward.  I’ve just completed the first (and largest) of several pieces of that upgrade.  This should be nearly invisible to you.  The main change that you should see is to the account administration pages.  Any other changes you see are most likely bugs. 

Which brings me to the main reason for this post.  Even though the site looks the same, a large part of the infrastructure has been updated.  This involved a whole bunch of small changes each of which potentially introduced bugs.  So the site will probably be a bit buggier than usual for a bit while I continue to hunt the bugs down and deal with them.  This process will go a lot faster if all of you help out and let me know when you see bugs on the site.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve established a bug bounty to reward you for reporting bugs.  And now, it should be that much easier to find them.

I’ve still got a decent amount of infrastructure work to do to get to the point where I’m churning out new features as the main part of my music4dance time.  But in the meantime, please keep the feature requests coming in as well as the bug reports.  And thanks again everyone for all of the ways you support the music4dance effort.

One final thought: Dancing is such a community based activity that these times are particularly hard for those whose lives and livelihoods are dependent on being in the same room with others.  Everyone please stay safe and sane in these crazy times and hold tight until we can all return to our respective dance floors.