A number of years ago, I added a “Changes” section to the song details pages to show who had voted for which dances for that song. I also included a few other pieces of information that users (both live and proxy) set. But now that I have enabled any signed-in user to modify tempos and delete tags set by algorithms, it only seems reasonable to enhance the song history/changes section to show where this information is coming from. I still believe that the core benefit of this section is to show who voted on dances for a song, so the new information is only shown if you check the “Include Automated” toggle at the top of the section. Also note that you have to be signed in to see the toggle.
Let me know what you think. Is this useful? Is it so useful that you’d prefer it as the default?
Anonymous Import
One other detail I’d like to point out. You may have noticed that some of the newly visible changes are attributed to “Anonymous Import.” This is a catch-all account I’m using to name changes whose origins became obscured over time due to changes in the code or data. One example is that, at one point, I ran a beat-detection algorithm over my personal library and uploaded the results. I don’t want to attribute these tempos to me as a human user, so I put them in this bucket. I’m not thrilled with the name for that bucket, but I’m hoping it isn’t too confusing.
Step of the Month
The “Step of the Month” for May is to share your favorite search. You can share a search by copying the URL from the browser address bar and pasting it into a comment for this post. Feel free to add details as to what you did and why it’s your favorite. And there is nothing stopping you from sharing more than one of your favorites -:)
Song Details
The music4dance song details page contains all of the information that we have gathered about a song, including tags and dances that you have may have added. Below is a snapshot of a song details page for “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” as seen by a user “Charlie” while he is editing it.…
Ask music4dance: When was this song added to the catalog?
Someone recently asked me to add a feature that shows when a song was added to the music4dance catalog. It turns out this feature already exists, but the fact that this person didn’t realize it means it isn’t as obvious as it should be. This is especially true, given that the questioner demonstrated she was…
Who else likes to dance to this song (and what do they dance to it)?
As I browse the music4dance catalog and find a song I like, it’s nice to be able to see who added it and use that as a way to find other songs that I might like. To this end, I’ve added a new section to the song details page called Changes that lists the changes…
New Feature: More ways to see what’s going on at music4dance
One of my goals for music4dance is to build a system that people can use to share their knowledge of partner dance music with others. I probably spent too much time early on in this project building bots and scrapers to seed the catalog with content and neglected the community aspect of the site. So…
music4dance 
To kick off the favorite search comments (and to make sure things aren’t getting caught in spam filters): When searching for songs to dance Bolero to, I like to include both Bolero and Rumba, since international Rumba is just slightly faster than American Bolero, and then narrow the tempo down to 96-100 BPM. https://www.music4dance.net/song/filtersearch?filter=v2-advanced-RMB%2CBOL—–96-104
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I like to choose the Waltz group in advanced search and then filter by tempo to 100-108 BPM to capture slow practice Waltzes that might not be categorized as “Slow Waltz” specifically.- https://www.music4dance.net/song/filtersearch?filter=v2-advanced-WLZ——100–108
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Here’s a fun search for songs that have been used on Dancing With the Stars:
https://www.music4dance.net/song/filtersearch?filter=v2-filtersearch———–%2BDWTS%3AOther
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Step of the Month search:
Songs for Dancing – Music4Dance: Shall we dance…to music?
I was trying to find more West Coast Swing songs. Too many lists are heavy on songs I just would not play. I observed that many of the ones I did like were also upvoted by user sabrinaskandy, so I made a search for her WCS choices. I created a Spotify playlist of her top 100. After listening, I danced to and added a good percentage to my list.
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Update: I’ve been working with the WordPress support team, since I have reports that posts to this thread were being rejected by a spam filter (completely rejected, not just ending up in the spam folder). It looks like this has been resolved and people are able to post comments with complex URLs like the music4dance advanced search URLs. So, if you tried earlier and were unable to post a comment, please try again. Thanks!
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