New Feature: Filter by Song Length

If you’re trying to get a playlist together for a social dance, it would be nice for the songs to be a reasonable length for your audience. 

I realize that DJ tools will let you manage this in multiple ways, but sometimes it’s just easier to start with songs in the length range you’d like. There are probably other good reasons to be able to filter on the duration of a song; let me know if you think of any.

Again at Arne’s prompting, I implemented the ability to filter on song length using the advanced search page. My quick and dirty implementation is to filter on a range of seconds. This implementation will let you do things like get all the Salsa songs in the catalog between 90 and 180 seconds between 150-180 beats per minute. Or any other variations that you come up with.

I already store the duration values for songs, so this wasn’t a heavy lift. But I did take some shortcuts to get this feature out quickly. I’d prefer a slicker control to choose the length, and it would be awfully nice if when you searched or sorted on the length that the length showed up in the results. Neither of these would be particularly hard to do. Still, I’d like to hear if others are using this feature and how they’re using it before I invest more into it.

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.

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