Monthly Archives: February 2022

New Feature: Searching for a song from Spotify or iTunes

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A new member of the music4dance community, Arne, pointed out that he expected to be able to search by Spotify Id. Furthermore, he figured out how to do that by going to the Add Song by Id and dragging the song from Spotify into the edit field on that page.

This is a case of programmer myopia on my part. I wrote all of the code to look up a song in the Spotify and iTunes catalog with the idea of (a) being able to link back to those catalogs and then (b) to make it easier to add songs to the music4dance catalog. I didn’t really think that someone would want to look for a song they were playing in Spotify or Apple Music in the music4dance catalog. Actually – I did, but the way I was thinking about that was a much bigger feature that I may never get around to implementing.

What clicked in my slow programmer brain when I saw Arne’s question was that I had most of the code for a really cool feature but hadn’t seen the opportunity to implement it since I had this much more grandiose feature in my head. After the obligatory forehead slap and exclamation of “Duh!” I set about seeing how easy it would be to use what I had already written to implement a reasonably smooth version of what our Arne was doing.

It was definitely straightforward – a bit of refactoring and a few dozen lines of new code, and I’ve got something that I think is pretty slick. But I’ll let you judge:

When listening to a song in Spotify or  Apple Music, drag the song from the player and drop it into the text box on the top of either the Song Library page or the Advanced Search page. If the song is in the music4dance catalog, we’ll take you directly to the song page and show you what others have voted on to dance to that song. If it’s not already in the library, we’ll give you the option to add the song yourself.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback. As should be obvious from this post, your feedback is essential to making music4dance better. In addition, I read every piece of feedback that comes through and respond to as much as I can. So please share any thoughts and ideas you have about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

Valentine’s Day Edition: Love Songs that We Love to Dance to

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I’ve been making an effort to tag songs and write sophisticated searches to find good songs for holiday dances. The music4dance catalog is set up for this kind of search. Not only that, but I’ve always really enjoyed doing exhibition pieces for holiday parties.

I started with the Christmas/Winter holidays and added Halloween more recently. I hadn’t really thought about Valentine’s Day. But when I did (a little late for this year, but never too early to be planning for next year), I realized that I already had something pretty useful: What better place to look for love songs than a wedding music catalog. Which, coincidently, I’ve spent some time building up.

So if you’re looking for love songs to dance to, check out the Wedding Dance page and let me know what you think. This time of year, there are plenty of generic lists of Love Songs, so if I get some feedback that you’d like a more general list of danceable love songs, I can do some cross-indexing with one or more of those lists. And of course, you can always start adding songs and/or tagging existing songs with a “Love Song” tag and create your own lists.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.