Filtering on song length is one of the most requested/appreciated features from the DeeJay/Music coordinator crowd. It’s also one of the first features I implemented in a round of requests I received from exchanges from this segment of the music4dance community – you can read about that in this post.

Since then, it has come up quite a few times, mostly as a “hey, this is one of the things I really love about music4dance,” and once or twice as a “it would be great if you implemented this feature,” in which case I get to gently (but gleefully inside) steer the questioner to the “Advanced Search Page.”

I’m bringing this to your attention now because I originally implemented this feature on the cheap. I’m only letting one filter between a minimum and a maximum number of seconds (which is what I store internally). Since it is such a recognized feature, it occurred to me that it might be time to put a little polish on it. My original idea was to have a minutes/seconds control for the minimum and maximum, since that’s probably what the humans are thinking in – that way they don’t have to translate to seconds. It’s not like they can’t do the math, but if this feature is widely used, I should make the experience smoother.

Which leads me to some questions, especially if you are a DJ or music coordinator (formal or informal):

• Would you prefer to filter on minutes/seconds rather than seconds?
• Do you use sorting on length? (I didn’t even remember that for certain that I had enabled that until I checked) It seems that if you were to use that feature, it would be good to include the length in the results table, right?
• Is there some other aspect of searching, filtering, or sorting on song length that could be improved?
• Are there any other related features you would like to see when building a playlist for your dance?

And some questions for the rest of you:

• Do you use this feature – possibly in a different way than I described, for different reasons?
• Can you think of other things you’d like to be able to search, sort, or filter on, or in a different way?

And for everyone – since at least some part of the community has been interested in the filter on song length feature and didn’t find it without asking, any thoughts on how I could make it more obvious?

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