I recently heard from a member of the music4dance community who hosts a community social ballroom dance for which he builds a playlist. He uses music4dance to find song ideas, then manually builds a spreadsheet and feeds it back into Spotify to create the final playlist.
I have a long-standing interest in making it easier to build playlists. I still have fond memories of my dance coach handing us a CD of custom-cut practice rounds (this was back in the ‘90s). When I started music4dance, I thought that once I had enough data, I’d be able to do some kind of auto-playlist generator where I randomly chose a high-ranked song from each dance type in a competition round and created a playlist that would be suitable to practice to. Unfortunately, the music4dance database isn’t nearly clean enough to do something like that. I’d need to be able to filter down to just songs that are strict-tempo for each dance, which I’m not even close to being able to do.
I’ve communicated with several DJs who use music4dance to build their playlists. It seems pretty common to want to be able to rotate through a pattern of different dances, so maybe there is some there there. The ability to create heterogeneous playlists of songs appropriate for different dances seems like a helpful feature.
But I’m also loathe to define my own playlist format and land myself in a situation where I’m storing everyone’s playlists. I already spend more time maintaining the music4dance code and systems than adding new features, so I want to be careful about creating features that add to that burden. But that’s not a complete blocker; if this is the way to provide the best user experience, I’d be happy to do it. I’d want to take the time to lock down the requirements before implementing a feature like this.
Hence, this blog post. If you use music4dance to build playlists, how do you do it? And what do you want the format of the end result to be? A Spotify Playlist? A spreadsheet? An integration with the DJ software you use? If so, what software? Please let me know.
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music4dance 
Hi I’m in western Australia and my husband and myself are in a musical duo. We cater for dancers from ballroom to line dancing I was so pleased when I came across your site I want to thank you for your site it has helped us immensely knowing we can call our to our dancers what dance they can do to each of our songs . I have a query and hope you can help me A lot of our dance groups over here love to dance the partnered dance sea shells The song “Blue night” by Michael learns to Rock sings the song they dance to. Is there a list on your data base of similar songs to that one that they can also dance Sea Shells to? Kind regards Colette Ps keep up the good work
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I solely use Spotify but wish I could integrate it easily into VDJ. Open to suggestions. Laurel
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@Laurel Charvat-Roddis – When you say “integrate it easily into VDJ” do you mean that you’d like to play spotify playist in Virtual DJ? Are they tracks that you have on your computer locally as well? I don’t have a good solution to that – I’ve been toying with mapping the music4dance catalog to MusicBrainz.org ids, which would potentially let you build local playlists, but there are a few things blocking that right now.
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@Ronnie & Colly Duo – Thanks for the question. I don’t know that specific choreography or even the underlying partner dance. But the music sounds like a Bolero or International Rumba to me – so here is a list of songs that are about that tempo and should have a similar feel. There are a number of other things about this that have me thinking, so look out with a blog post with some more ideas soon.
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I’d be happy to add an integration to BallroomDJ 4 (BDJ4) to import playlists, but as you have noticed, there is the perennial problem of how to identify a song.
I can import M3U playlists, but M3U has an absolute path to a local file. Some sort of lookup processing could be done, but as always, it is hard to identify the proper match.
I personally have no interest in integrating Spotify into BDJ4, as I don’t care for proprietary interfaces, but someone else could write that code for BDJ4. There are some issues I would still have to deal with, and that is something I want to resolve in BDJ4.
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I think we’ve talked about the possibility of using MusicBrainz ids as a lingua franca in the past. I’ve been slowly moving towards a place where I could generate a playlist of those ids (the biggest barrier is that their license would require me to go open source, which I’m 100% planning to do, but have to figure a bunch of things out to get there – I’m knocking them off, but they are pretty big lifts). Anyway – is that still a possibility from your end? Already implemented? Or something you’d be willing to implement?
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I have the MusicBrainz IDs available in my database. I haven’t done a lot with them, as many of the ballroom songs (i.e. songs by ballroom music companies) have never been put into MusicBrainz. If the ID exists, it can be used to retrieve the audio tags.
There would be some minor work on my end to look up a song based on the MusicBrainz ID. Not very difficult.
I can add support for Spotify IDs, but that would either need a way to get them into my database (manually is very easy but annoying for the user), or a complete spotify audio source interface.
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