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Sorry about that nasty bug

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I introduced a bug in the last update of music4dance and then went on vacation.  This is a pretty classic software engineering blunder and I’m very sorry for the trouble it caused.  The good news is a bunch of people noticed it and cared enough to report it. Thanks, everyone for that and I’ll be sending you your bug bounty shorty!  The bad news is that I had another series of other issues that meant that I didn’t actually see the feedback until I found the bug myself.

In any case, the bug is now fixed and things should be back in working order.  The reason that I didn’t notice the bug as I was testing is that I was working on a feature to help show member activity on songs to improve the feature I talked about in a previous post and the bug cropped up for people that aren’t logged in which I failed to check with the very last change.

It’s entirely possible to set up a system where automated testing would catch this level of bug.  And I certainly have that kind of testing in place for the sites that I build in my day job.  But that kind of testing costs both in my time and dollars for infrastructure.  Since music4dance isn’t even a break-even proposition without adding more infrastructure, I will probably leave that level of testing on the back-burner for a while.  The good news is that I checked and the last time I had this level of an issue with the site was well over two years ago.

Speaking of the finances behind music4dance, I will take this opportunity to note that if you find the site useful I’d really appreciate your support.  While financial support is always welcome, I know everyone is not in the position to provide that so there are plenty of other ways to help the project. I’ve listed a bunch of them on the Contribute page.  Please check it out and do what you can.

Again, I’m very sorry for the inconvenience that this bug caused and wish everyone the best dancing during the upcoming holiday season.

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What is Your Favorite music4dance Feature?

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I’m in the middle of doing a substantial rewrite of music4dance to modernize it and, hopefully, clean up the code enough that I can start adding new features without breaking things.  I had originally intended to keep all of the functionality of the site as I moved forward.  But this has been a bigger undertaking than I anticipated.  In additional, the original site grew somewhat organically, so there are multiple ways of doing things that weren’t so much designed as grown. I’m not sure that it makes sense to preserve all of the different ways of doing the same thing.

Right now I am rewriting the core song list functionality that is used on all or the pages that (surprise) list songs.  This includes the main song library, all of the dance pages, and the holiday music pages.  In addition the results of advanced search and the pages that you navigate to from many of the other pages like the wedding music, tags, and the ballroom dance pages will be affected by this round of changes.  And I’m finding it difficult to reproduce all of the existing functionality while keeping the code clean enough to feel like I can move forward.  Not to mention that I’m itching to get through this to start writing new features.

So, before I arbitrarily start cutting things, I thought I’d ask:  How do you use music4dance?  What are your favorite features?  Please let me know, so I don’t go and remove something that I don’t think is essential, but that is the reason that you love the site.

Please reply to this post or send feedback with your favorite features or a description of how you use the site.

Quick Tip: You can share your searches.  Any time you create a list of songs, whether that is through using advanced search, or by refining a search in other ways, you can copy the URL out of the browsers address bar and share it with friends and fellow dancers.

Archive

Is Simple Better?

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I’m making a good deal of progress on updating the music4dance site to more modern technologies.  The main reason for doing this, as I’ve noted before, is to make it easier to add new functionality.

While I’m still in transition, it seems like a good time to get feedback on the new look.  I’m going for the simpler is better concept.  Where the old site had a different color for each section, the new pages are all themed in the same way.  I’ve also dropped back to using standard fonts and styles.  Among other things, it’s faster to do it this way (which will let me get to new features more quickly), it’s more accessible, and it is generally the direction I’m trying to go with things like simplifying search.

As of now (August of 2020), I’m about halfway through the transition.  Pretty much all of the pages except for the core pages that include song lists and the home page are converted.  So you can compare a page like the song library page (old style) to one like the ballroom page.  Or you can compare the dance style page to the help for the dances style page (which still contains an image of the old page).

So what do you think?  Old or new?  It’s not too late for me to add back in some of the customization if you think that’s a key part of what makes music4dance a place you spend time.

Oh, and while I’m at it – can I get feedback on how useful the help pages are?  I’ve not written help for all of the functionality and I haven’t bothered to convert help pages where the functionality is close to the original even if the look is different.  But if I get feedback that they are particularly useful, I’ll prioritize help higher.

As always, feedback is always welcome on any part of the site.

Quick Tip: If you’re looking for music that is within the specific tempo guidelines for NDCA or DanceSport guidelines, you can find links on the ballroom page.  Each of the tables on that page links to lists of songs listed at the correct tempo for that dance.

Archive

Where is that feature I asked about?

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There are a bunch of features that folks have requested that I am really interested in working on.  These are basic features like adding your own songs, community features like being able to ask what to dance to a song or seeing all of a specific dancer’s recommendations, and practical features like more versatility in exporting search results.

But you may have noticed that I released the last significant new feature last year and overall the evolution of the site has been pretty slow recently.  This is partly because music4dance is a passion project that I manage in my spare time and partly because it’s a big and complex enough project that something breaks for one reason or another and I lose days or weeks of project time just maintaining the status quo.

All this to say that for the past six months, I’ve been spending the bulk of my available music4dance time upgrading the infrastructure so that I can more easily add features moving forward.  I’ve just completed the first (and largest) of several pieces of that upgrade.  This should be nearly invisible to you.  The main change that you should see is to the account administration pages.  Any other changes you see are most likely bugs. 

Which brings me to the main reason for this post.  Even though the site looks the same, a large part of the infrastructure has been updated.  This involved a whole bunch of small changes each of which potentially introduced bugs.  So the site will probably be a bit buggier than usual for a bit while I continue to hunt the bugs down and deal with them.  This process will go a lot faster if all of you help out and let me know when you see bugs on the site.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve established a bug bounty to reward you for reporting bugs.  And now, it should be that much easier to find them.

I’ve still got a decent amount of infrastructure work to do to get to the point where I’m churning out new features as the main part of my music4dance time.  But in the meantime, please keep the feature requests coming in as well as the bug reports.  And thanks again everyone for all of the ways you support the music4dance effort.

One final thought: Dancing is such a community based activity that these times are particularly hard for those whose lives and livelihoods are dependent on being in the same room with others.  Everyone please stay safe and sane in these crazy times and hold tight until we can all return to our respective dance floors.

Archive

The music4dance Blog Just Moved

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I just moved the music4dance blog and help system to a new provider.  I hate the fact that many recent posts have been about infrastructure changes that I’ve made due to one or another of my providers breaking something under me.  But such is the world of software.  I won’t bore you with the details here (you’re welcome).  At some point I may take the time to explain what happened this time on my technical blog with the hope of saving others similar pain.

What does this mean to you?  Hopefully not a whole lot.  The URL for the blog is now https://music4dance.blog rather than https://www.music4dance.net/blog.  But even if you have bookmarks to the old blog or help, they should redirect smoothly to the new site without any action on your part.  Also, I spent a decent amount of time when I first set up the site to try to make the blog and help system look like a relatively seamless part of the main site.  Not everything that I did directly translates to the new host, so the blog looks a little more like a separate site.   I think that’s all right, but I’m open to other opinions.

The other impact of this change is that I’m now paying for something that used to be free, so I will politely ask again that you consider supporting music4dance.net in one way or another.

As always, I welcome feedback.  I read every email and do my best to respond to them all.

Archive

Farewell to the “Sign in with Microsoft” option on music4dance

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Microsoft has moved to a new sign-in protocol and our current system for signing in with a Microsoft account started failing.  I looked into switching over to the new protocol and it seems like a few hours of work.  But given that I only have a few hours a week to devote to music4dance that’s really a week’s worth of work.  Since I have very few customers that use this login method and the main reason for supporting this method was for Xbox Music AKA Groove Music integration which has already been deprecated, I’ve notified those individuals with a work-around and am turning off this feature.

If you believe that this is an indispensable feature, please provide feedback and I’ll consider re-implementing it.  If you have issues logging in with any other method please file a bug and I will do my best to address it.

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Farewell to Groove Music

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Microsoft is “retiring” its Groove Music Service (aka Xbox Music aka Zune).  Why am I blogging about this?  Partly it is because I just removed support from Groove from music4dance. Partly because that service was part of the reason that music4dance evolved the way that it did.  But mostly it is because there is some overlap between music4dance users and Groove subscribers.  Approximately 15% of users that expressed a music service preference checked the Groove Music box as one of the options.  So for those of you that are Groove Music subscribers, please make sure to check out the Spotify migration option before the January 31st, 2018.

In any case, you’ll no longer see the Groove Music symbol in the play or purchase song options on the site.  Spotify, iTunes and Amazon Music are still fully supported though, so most songs can be located in at least one of those catalogs.

The other statistic I noticed while checking on Groove usage is that only about 25% of registered music4dance users have expressed a preference for any music service.  So if you’ve got a minute please head to your profile page and let me know which music services you use.  This helps me prioritize features.  And if you use a service that I’m not currently listing, please send me feedback directly and I’ll add it to the list of choices.

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crowdnote.org

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Update 2020: Crowdnote.org went offline about a year after I posted this. I’m keeping the post around for posterity, but removing the links.

Another programmer and amateur ballroom dancer created a site called crowdnote.org that solves some of the same problems that I’ve attacked in the music4dance project.  He has done an extremely good job of streamlining the process of browsing through music and finding songs to dance a particular style to.  He has also done a great job of making the voting process very easy.

Check it out here:  crowdnote.org.

We would both be very interested to hear your thoughts on what you like/dislike about each of the sites and we’re both open to suggestions for improvements.  Feel free to comment on this post or provide feedback via the music4dance feedback form.

Archive

Where did all the Collegiate Shag music go?

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When I first started publishing lists of swing music on the music4dance site, I grouped all of the swing style dances together and then used tempo ranges to guess at specific dance styles.  This method works reasonably well for some of the core swing dances such as Lindy Hop, East Coast Swing, and Jive.

But a helpful Carolina Shag DJ contacted me to let me know that this method did not work at all for Carolina Shag since the dance ancestor might be swing, but the music that one typically dances to doesn’t even have a swing rhythm.  And of course, both Hustle and West Coast Swing are very much part of the swing family of dances but don’t require a swing rhythm to dance to.  So I went back and made the default searches only return songs that someone had explicitly tagged as a type of swing rather than inferring anything from general category and tempo.

Since the only exposure I had to Collegiate Shag was a reference that it was a swing style dance to music between 180-200 beats per minute when I turned off the “infer by tempo” feature,  I stopped listing any Collegiate Shag songs.  Well, that seemed wrong, so I did some digging around the web and found a few lists of Collegiate Shag songs and incorporated them into the music4dance catalog.

Do you dance or DJ Collegiate Shag?  Please, let me know if there are other songs that I should add to this list.

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Oops, I didn’t mean to throw that needle into the haystack…

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I recently heard from a customer that he was searching for “Oh, These Dark Eyes“ on the site and this is what he saw:

Search with bad sort

In fact, “Oh, These Dark Eyes” by Tango No. 9  is in the music4dance catalog, but it wasn’t even showing up on the first page.  That seems crazy.  And wrong.

After a little digging, I discovered my mistake.  When I merged the Search Like Google feature into the default search I left the default sort set to “most recent”.  So when you search for anything with a bunch of words in it, there will be a whole lot of results (in this case 464) and if I sort by anything other than closest match what I’m really looking for is likely to get lost like a needle in a haystack.

This should now be fixed.  When you search by default you’ll get the most relevant results at the top of the page (just like a normal search engine).  I’ve also added a “Closest Match” button to the search order possibilities on the Advanced Search Page which is the default.

So hopefully there will be less searching for needles in haystacks.

dark-eyes-good

Thanks to the gentle customer that pointed out my mistake.  I’m always looking for ways to improve the site so please feel free to send me feedback if anything looks like it’s not working the way you suspect.  Even if it’s not an outright bug (like this one was), I’m happy to take feedback and see if I can make music4dance a more useful resource for you and others.

And lest you think I’ve dropped my head completely back into code and failed to continue to improve the content, I’ve added some more DWTS songs this week as well as digging up and integrating some fresh lists of  ballroom music, including some fun new Cha-Cha, Rumba, and Tango songs.  You can still find the most recent changes to the catalog by sorting by modified date.  That’s the little pencil icon right below the “Advanced Search” text on any search results.   Or if you want to get tricky and just find the songs that have been most recently added, you can go to the Advanced Search Page  and choose “When Added” in the “Sort By” field.