Category Archives: About music4dance

Posts that are about the music4dance.net site features, excluding features that are specifically about searching for music.

About music4dance

New Feature: More ways to see what’s going on at music4dance

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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 I am now trying to focus on more community-building features.  This includes everything from simplifying the system so that it’s easier to add new styles of dance to making it easier for members to add new songs to making it possible for members to see who else likes to dance to a song.

Following on to the feature where I added the ability to see the voting history on a song on the details page, I’ve added a couple of small feature-lets.

Now,  when you filter music on a user you will see a column  with that user’s changes:

If you know a user’s username, you can filter by a user in the advanced search page by typing the username and choosing what you want to filter on (likes, tags, etc.).  Or you can go down the path described in a previous post and click on a username anywhere that one shows up.  That will take you to a page that will let you filter on all the songs that the user has tagged or all the songs that that user has added to favorites among other things. Eventually, I’d like to have that page contain additional user profile information.

The other fun thing you can do is on the new music page.  The song list on that page has a similar column to the one above that shows latest change to each song and who made it.  That’s a way to find users that are actively adding songs and seeing what they’re up to.

And finally, when you’re exploring these features if you find a search that you want to share with others, you can just copy the URL and send it to a friend. That’s what I do with links back to the music4dance site with these blogs – so it’s not a new feature, but it is becoming more useful with the other community features that I’m building.

As always, I welcome feedback on not just the feature, but the site in general.  And if you find the site useful, please consider contributing in any way that you can.

About music4dance

What is the difference between adding a song to Favorites and voting on a  Song’s Danceability?

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From discussions with dancers navigating the music4dance site and observing people’s usage of the site I realize that I still haven’t made it easy to understand the nuances of a couple of important features.  I’m trying to default to simplifying the site wherever possible. But enough people are using both of these features that I don’t feel good about getting rid of either of them.  So I made some changes in terminology and behavior and I’m interested to know if this makes more sense.

Here are the two features at issue:

  1. The concept of voting on the danceability of a song to a particular dance style.  For instance – I love dancing Cha Cha to “Let’s Get Loud” by Jennifer Lopez, so I’ll vote on that.
  2. The concept of adding songs to a favorites or blocked list.  Up until this change I labelled the favorites/blocked list as like/dislike, which I now believe is part of the source of confusion.

It’s important to the music4dance community that people vote on the danceability of a song to dance styles – this is what helps build and refine the catalog that is the core of the site and the main reason that people visit it.

It’s also useful to be able to add songs to a favorites list so that you can filter on that for future searches.   And frankly, blocking a song that you are just sick of is kind of nice as well.

The two concepts are almost completely separate in how they would be used.  But they are too easily confused.  I hope that moving from the like/dislike nomenclature to favorites/blocked list will make things less confusing.

Since I feel the voting concept is more useful to the community, I’ve also done some things to make that more discoverable.  The most recent of these is that when you click on the heart (add to favorites) button in the main song lists, rather than just toggling through favorites/blocked/neutral, it will bring up a modal that will let you explicitly choose one of those options as well as quickly vote on any of the dance styles already associated with the song.

I’ve also added a voting button to dance info modal that is available by clicking on the dance voting results button.

As I noted at the beginning, this is something that I’ve been struggling with for some time (check out this post from 2016) and hope I’ve improved it a bit.  But I’m sure there are other things I can do to make this better, so please send me any of your ideas and let me know if you think the latest change works better (or worse) for you.

And, as always, I’m open to feedback about the feature discussed here as well as the site overall.

Music4dance could use your help:  Please take a look the contribute page:  This lists a bunch of ways to contribute from purchasing premium memberships to voting on songs to sharing with your friends and a bunch of things in between.

About music4dance

New Feature: Adding Songs to the music4dance Catalog

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I’m excited to announce that I’ve nearly completed a feature that will let you add songs to the music4dance catalog.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have a couple of kind folks test it so far and they’re pretty happy with it.  I’ve documented the feature here and am keeping it under beta for a little while longer – I’d love to have a few more people give it a try before I open this feature up to all music4dance members.  So please reach out to me soon if you’d like to give it a try.

About music4dance

Who else likes to dance to this song (and what do they dance to it)?

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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 people (and the bots/scrapers that I’ve written) have made to the song.

For instance, I like dancing East Coast Swing to Demi Lovato‘s Confident.  If I look that up in the music4dance catalog (I can just search for that on the catalog page) – I can go to the song details by clicking on the title of the song and then look for the new Changes section in the lower right.

This shows me that ZacharyPachol, BatesBallooom and JonathanWolfgram have all voted for this song to be danced as an East Coast Swing.  So I can, for instance, click on ZacharyPachol and get to a list of all songs that he has voted on.  I can then click on “Change Search” to filter the list down to East Coast Swing songs that ZacharyPachol has voted on.  Or I can just click on any East Coast Swing tag in the original search and choose to filter the list that way.

Even as I write this, I see that there are several ways I might want to improve this feature.  But I have a limited amount of time and so many ideas, so please let me know if you find the feature useful and if you would like improvements. Also, I’m very interested in getting more direct participation in rating songs (the site is currently built much more on automation than direct user participation) – so let me know what would make rating songs interesting to you.

P.S. There are about ten other things I’d like to say about this, but I’m trying to keep this short so I can get out more posts.  But I can’t resist noting that you can also see that this song was used on Dancing with the Stars to dance Paso Doble and Ballroom Tango – a good example of how one can use a song for a performance piece that you might not want to dance (that dance style to) socially.

About music4dance

How do you like to see lists of music to dance to?

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One of the core features of music4dance is to be able to list songs for dancing in a bunch of different ways.  As I noted a little while ago, I’m at the point in the process of the site upgrade where I’m reworking that core functionality.  In a world of infinite (or even abundant) resources , I’d get the new functionality up and running and give you the opportunity to switch back and forth between the new and the old for some period of time and give me your feedback.  While that’s a bit out of my reach, it occurred to me that it’s pretty easy to just roll out what I’ve got on some of the pages and leave the old stuff in place on others. That will give you the opportunity to see them both and compare and give feedback.

As of this writing (November 15th, 2020) I’ve got an initial version working and rolled out to some of the pages.  You can see the new song lists on  the Holiday Music page including the specific holiday dance variants like Holiday Cha Cha and Holiday Foxtrot, the New Music page and the dance pages including both the dance group pages like the Swing page and specific dance pages like the Rumba page.  The old version is still live in the basic song library and as the results of advanced searches as well as any of the links from other places on the site that bring up a song list.

Please take a look and let me know what you think.  I’m particularly interested in anything that I left out in the new version that you used in the old version.  But I’m also always open to feedback and ideas for what I could do to make this content more helpful for you.

As always, thank you for supporting music4dance and please feel to provide feedback on the subject of this post or anything else relating to music4dance.

About music4dance

Tempo Counter (Revisited)

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As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things that I find helpful is to have access to a tempo counter that allows me to tap a beat and both measure the tempo and show me the dance styles that fall into that range.  I wrote a version of that for Windows Phone way back in the day.  I’ve had a web version up on the musci4dance site almost since it’s inception.  It seemed like time to do a quick revisit and freshen it up a bit.  I decided to use this as a quick test of the newer technologies I’m starting to incorporate in the site.

So check it out and let me know what you think (here’s some updated documentation as well).  If you were a regular user of the old tempo counter, please let me know if there is anything that you depended on that the new one doesn’t do as well.  And of course, I’m happy to hear about what you think has improved as well as any features neither of them has that you would like to see.

Stay Safe. Stay Sane!

About music4dance

Ask music4dance: Can I export music4dance playlists to play locally?

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of music4dance since long before streaming services like Spotify existed, so the idea of generating playlist that could be played against files locally on my computer has certainly been on my radar.

But the quick answer to this question is, unfortunately, no.

The longer answer is (of course) that it’s complicated.  The most recent person to ask about this specifically was interested in exporting to .m3u files to be used in ballroomDJ.  So I’ll use that as an example, but the general issue that I’m about to outline applies to all of the local players and playlist formats that I’ve encountered. 

The problem is that local playlist formats generally use file paths to locate the media that they play.  Since most of the information that I’ve compiled in music4dance comes from streaming and commerce services, I have no idea what the filename might be for the songs in the catalog, much less where on disk it my be hiding.

Quite some time ago, I wrote some experimental code that will take a list of song title and artist and search through a local music library in order to attempt to match and create a usable playlist.  This worked reasonably well, and when I added possible albums and song length to do some disambiguation it worked a little better.  But it wasn’t close to 100% and I’m struggling for a way to generalize that to run on anyone’s system without writing a player of my own.

In any case, I’m not writing about this question just to say that the answer is hard.  I’m interested in your feedback in two ways. 

  1. Does anyone have any leads on a media player that does a decent job of consuming some online description of a playlist and matching it to local media?  I certainly haven’t done a full survey of the possibilities recently, so I may be missing something that could help solve this problem.
  2. How useful would this be for you?  If enough people express interest in this I’ll push it up in my queue.

As a slight aside, I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to point out that I did get this working for Spotify playlists. While that doesn’t solve the exact problem for those who use local media libraries, it’s very cool for Spotify users. Read about that in this post: Create a Spotify Playlist.

As always if you have comments or suggestions please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here.  And let me know if you like the Q&A blog format.  If you do, send me more questions to answer, please!

About music4dance

Create a Spotify Playlist

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One of my initial goals with music4dance was to be able to create playlists to dance to.  I can finally say that I’ve got this working in a way that is close to my original vision at least for Spotify.

The idea is, for instance, that I’d like to build a playlist of Foxtrot songs that are on the faster end of the spectrum (say 132-136bpm) and further limit the list to songs that are in the pop genre.  I’ve had the system in place for a long time to generate search results for a list like this from the advanced search page. 

The new and exciting thing is that when you get the results of this search, there is a button at the bottom labeled “Create Spotify Playlist.” Clicking on that button will bring you to a page where you can name the playlist and choose the number of songs from the search results to include.  More help on this feature is available here.

Creating a custom playlist is a premium feature.  But you can take advantage of all of the standard playlists by checking out the music4dance profile on Spotify.

As always, I welcome feedback both on this post and the site in general.  I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the site in any of the many possible ways.  And if you enjoy the site please consider contributing in any way that makes sense to you.

About music4dance

Announcing a music4dance Bug Bounty

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Software bugs are miserable things in any context.  But when you have a small project like music4dance where there are so many external dependencies, bugs can creep in even when nothing has changed in the project.  Add that to all of the normal avenues of bug creation and things can turn into a mess very rapidly.  I have to balance very limited amount of time on music4dance between creating content (like this blog post), curating content on the site, adding new features, testing and fixing bugs.  Not to mention adding automated testing and production logging.

Needless to say, this gets very complicated very fast and things slip through the cracks.  And then you end up with anywhere between a slightly annoying to a completely unusable experience.  This obviously not good for anybody and frustrating for all.

But there are thousands of you out there that visit music4dance regularly.  So if you report bugs as you see them, hopefully we can nip them in the bud and make the experience better for everyone.  I can’t promise to fix every bug that comes through but I’ll do my best to keep up so that everyone’s experience is improved.

And to sweeten the pot I’d like to offer a bug bounty for each unique bug reported.  Check out our Bug Report page for details.

As always, I’m interested in feedback beyond bug reports so feel free to respond to this post or use our feedback page.

About music4dance

Check out our new Bonus Content Feature

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As of this writing the publicly visible music4dance catalog contains just over twenty seven thousand songs.  But the underlying index contains well over forty six thousand songs.  So what’s the deal with the missing twenty thousand songs?  These are song listings that I’ve pulled in one way or another but aren’t complete in some way.

  1. All of the songs must have been matched to an entry in one of the publisher catalogs that we search.
  2. Each song must have been tagged with at least one dance style.

I believe that these are perfectly reasonable constraints and help to reduce confusion for a novice user. However, there is a whole lot of information indexed in our catalog that people aren’t seeing and could be of some use.

One of the things that people often do on the site is to search for ideas for songs to dance to.  They will search for an artist name or a fragment of the title of a song and see what comes up.  This works great, but of course, the more songs that can be searched the more likely that you’ll get a useful idea.  The songs that are in the bonus section have had less scrutiny, many of them probably have small typos or other inaccuracies in the title or artist that prevented them from being matched to a publisher’s catalog.  Or they might be obscure songs that just aren’t as easily available on Spotify or Amazon.  In either case, I think getting to these additional songs is useful to the expert user sleuthing for the interesting or obscure song to choreograph to or surprise their dancers with.

Another case is where someone is looking for a song of a particular tempo but doesn’t necessarily need it to be specifically for one of the dance styles that we currently catalog.  This might be because they’re looking for something to dance to in a different style that might have a specific  tempo requirement but doesn’t necessarily have some of the other requirements for partner dancing.  One case that comes to mind is tap dance music, but I’m sure there are others.  One could potentially use this for finding running or exercise music of a specific tempo.

If you’re interested in exploring this, here’s how:

As always, I’m interested in your feedback. Please let me know if this feature seems useful to you. Or even better, let me know how you use this feature so that I can add that to common use cases and blog about it in the future.