Tag Archives: Advanced Search

About music4dance

New Feature: Copy Link to This View, or how to share a tempo table

In my post about automatic tempo correction, I asked for help with the tempo thresholds, and I included a link that opened the tempos page with just the Meter, BPM, and Range columns showing. I promised to explain “that little trick in a future post.” This is that post, but the trick has changed since I wrote that.

In August, the only way to get a link like that was to know the parameter names and type them into the address bar, which is what I did. Now I don’t have to. The Dance Tempi page and the Tempo Counter each have a new button that copies a link to exactly what you’re looking at.

The easy way: Copy Link to This View

The Dance Tempi page with the Type dropdown set to Latin and the other filters at All. Below the filter box is a Copy Link to This View button, then a table of eleven Latin dances, from Bachata to Samba, with Name, Meter, BPM, and Range columns. Only Bachata, Bolero, and Salsa show a range.
The Dance Tempi page, filtered to the Latin dances with the Range column showing. The Copy Link to This View button sits just above the table.

Set up the Dance Tempi page however you like: pick styles, types, meters, and organizations from the dropdowns, and choose which columns to show. Then click Copy Link to This View, just above the table. The link goes to your clipboard, ready to paste into an email, a text, or a post on your studio’s Facebook page. Whoever opens it sees the same table you did. The image above is this link.

The address bar also updates as you change things, so bookmarking the page does the same job as copying the link. If you leave everything at the default, there’s nothing to add, and the link is just the plain page address.

The Tempo Counter set to Count Measures, showing 120.0 BPM and 30.0 MPM in 4/4. A Copy Link to This Tempo button sits above a list of matching dances: Slow Foxtrot, Tango, Cha Cha, Rumba, and West Coast Swing, each with its range in measures per minute followed by (4/4).
The Tempo Counter at 30 measures per minute in 4/4, with the Copy Link to This Tempo button above the list of matching dances.

The Tempo Counter works the same way, with a button labeled Copy Link to This Tempo just above the list of dances. Once you’ve tapped out or typed a tempo, the link captures the tempo, the meter, whether you’re counting beats or measures, and where the strictness slider is set. That’s handy if you’ve worked out the tempo of a song and want to show a partner or a student which dances fit it. The image above is this link.

The same idea is also on the song search pages: search results and the advanced search form now have a Copy Link to This Search button.

Building a link by hand

You don’t need any of this to use the buttons. But if you’re writing a web page or a handout and want to type a link straight into it, both pages take a handful of parameters:

  • The Dance Tempi page takes styles, types, meters, organizations, and columns, which match its four filters and its column chooser.
  • The Tempo Counter takes tempo (always in beats per minute), numerator (the beats per measure), count (beats or measures), and epsilon (where the strictness slider is set).

Every parameter is optional, and anything a page doesn’t recognize is quietly skipped rather than producing an error page. The full lists of values and defaults, with examples, are in the “Building a link by hand” sections of the Dance Tempi and Tempo Counter help pages, which I rewrote for this feature.

For the record, the link from the August post was https://www.music4dance.net/Home/Tempi?columns=meter&columns=bpm&columns=validationRange. The columns parameter lists every column to show, and validationRange is the Range column, which is hidden by default.

Two fixes to the Tempo Counter

Rewriting the Tempo Counter help page meant actually trying everything it describes, and that turned up two bugs:

  • With the strictness slider all the way to the left, toward less, the list was always empty, even when your tempo was squarely inside a dance’s range. The far left now shows exactly the dances whose range includes your tempo.
  • The dances in the list had lost their meter. That matters because in 4/4 the counter also lists the 2/4 dances, and their ranges are in 2/4 measures, which run twice as fast. Without the “(2/4)” after the range, Samba at 48-52 MPM looked like a terrible match for 24 MPM in 4/4, when it’s actually spot on. The meter is back.

What it doesn’t do

This is the incremental version, so there are a couple of gaps. The Filter Dances search box on the Dance Tempi page isn’t part of the link, and neither is the column you sorted by, so a shared table always opens sorted by name. If you run into a view you can’t link to, or a link that doesn’t open what you expected, please let me know.

Step of the Month

The  “Step of the Month” for October is to help out with the Halloween catalog. There are several ways to do this: you can add the Halloween Tag to songs that don’t have it and should, you can remove the Halloween Tag from songs that do have it and shouldn’t, or you can add new Halloween songs (I will also accept lists of songs if that’s easier – in that case, please reach out for details on accepted format).

New Feature: Automatic Tempo Correction by Dance

One of the cool things about maintaining a database of songs cataloged by dance is that I can use that information to correct the most common mistake made by algorithmic tempo matching: the double-time/halftime issue. I’ve done this on an ad hoc basis for years, but now I have everything lined up so the system…

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Music and Dance, Special Occasions

Songs for Halloween Ballroom and Partner Dances – 2026 edition

We continue to add to the music4dance Halloween song catalog. As of this writing, 1649 songs are tagged as Halloween and have a positive number of dance votes. Up nearly 500 songs from last year.

This year, rather than repeating information about how the catalog works or the motivations for how I’ve set up the pages (you can see that in previous Halloween posts), I’d like to focus on where I’ve overshot. What I mean by that is that I’ve pulled in songs labeled Halloween from many different sources. Since the catalog defaults to ordering by total dance votes, that puts things like Christina Aguilera’s “Candyman” at the top of the list. This isn’t obviously a Halloween song. It’s definitely not spooky. It may be useful at a Halloween dance to throw in a peppy Swing as a palate cleanser between spooky songs. Or it may be that it’s a fun song to do an exhibition dance to in costume.

The Dancing With The Stars Issue

In fact, one of the reasons “Candyman” ended up on the music4dance Halloween list is that it was featured in DWTS season 27’s Halloween episode. I haven’t been very consistent about cataloging DWTS music, but I’ve done enough that it contributes to the issue when I tag something as Halloween just because it’s on one of their Halloween episodes. I could fix this by retroactively changing all the DWTS Halloween tags to “Halloween Night” tags. Then I could manually go through and re-add Halloween to anything that I think qualifies. Or I could hope others do that over time.

A small detour into searching

I was going to provide a list of songs DWTS labeled as “Halloween,” but I realized this is another case of having the right data but not properly indexed for this task (and I’d run out of space if I indexed all tags this way). But it’s pretty much the same case as the dance votes by a specific user, where I pull the first chunk of the list (which is often the whole list) into memory and then filter it down.

But that’s not all

But DWTS isn’t the only list that the Halloween Tag came from. At one point, one of the generic Spotify-generated lists included that song, as well. So focusing too much on DWTS may not be the right move. And while I may be totally off-base and everyone else thinks “Candyman” qualifies as a Halloween song, plenty of other examples seem pretty suspicious.

So maybe the answer is to go through the Halloween songs and just clear that tag from anything that doesn’t seem particularly Halloweeny. What do you think? My general bias has been to pull in more songs and tags to give as broad a base as I can for browsing for ideas, then leave it as an exercise for you to do that last level of filtering. But in some cases (quite possibly this one) the signal can be drowned out by the noise.

Indexing on number of Halloween Votes

One possible mitigation is to index on the number of Halloween votes and default the sort to that rather than the dance votes. I could do something similar for Holidays. This would cause a combinatorial explosion if I indexed all tags, but I could probably do it for Halloween and Holiday (and maybe a few other interesting ones).

What now?

It’s too late for me to make major changes to the code before Halloween (especially far enough before Halloween to help people trying to put together playlists for Halloween dances). And I’m going to leave the specific catalog asks for the step of the month. But I would like your input on some broader questions that stem from the above, so please feel free to respond to this post or use any method listed on the feedback page to answer any or all of the following questions.

  • Should I remap DWTS “Halloween” songs to “Halloween Night” and exude them from the Halloween pages?
  • While I’m on DWTS, do you find these entries useful? Would you like me to do more complete cataloging of DWTS entries, or pull back further?
  • Do you think I’m pulling in too much? Would you prefer a smaller, more highly curated catalog than what I’m doing now?
  • If you read the aside, should I expand the Dance Vote per-user filter to include tag per user? e.g., let me search for all songs that DWTS tagged as “Halloween” and not pick up songs that DWTS contributed to in some other way, or that a different user tagged as “Halloween.”
  • Can you think of anything else I could do to improve the Halloween or Holiday catalogs? There might still be time to improve the Holiday catalog [link] for this season.

Step of the Month

The  “Step of the Month” for October is to help out with the Halloween catalog. There are several ways to do this: you can add the Halloween Tag to songs that don’t have it and should, you can remove the Halloween Tag from songs that do have it and shouldn’t, or you can add new Halloween songs (I will also accept lists of songs if that’s easier – in that case, please reach out for details on accepted format).

Songs for Halloween Ballroom and Partner Dances – 2025 edition

We continue to add to the music4dance Halloween song catalog. As of this writing, there are 1151 songs tagged as Halloween with a positive number of dance votes. As I’ve noted in previous posts, we’ve gone from using the general tagging mechanism where you could search on songs that had a musical genre of “Halloween”…

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Halloween Ballroom Music 2024

Halloween is fast approaching, and I’m updating the music4dance Halloween catalog to include more partner dance Halloween music. I’ve pulled some generic Halloween playlists and cross-referenced them with the existing music4dance catalog. Using this method and some help from the community, we now have 340 songs available in the Halloween catalog that are also tagged…

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New Feature: Searching for only the songs that someone has voted for

Arne pointed out the other day that it would be useful to be able to build a playlist for just the songs that he had voted for dancing Cha Cha. I scratched my head a bit because I thought this was already possible. I even added a feature last year to make it easier to see who has voted on dance styles…

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About music4dance

New Feature: An Artist Index, or what else has Kenny Rogers done?

In my last post, while working through the ways music4dance does and doesn’t handle artists, I wrote that I was “pretty sure I’ll implement an Artist Index of some kind in the foreseeable future.” It turns out that the foreseeable future was about ten days. The artist index is live, under Music → Artists.

Browsing

The music4dance artist index page: a search box, an A-to-Z letter navigation row, and four columns of artist names, each followed by its song count.
The artist index, opened to the artists with the most songs in the catalog.

The page starts with the hundred artists who have the most songs, which is interesting in its own right — the top of that list is as much practice/ballroom orchestras as it is the names you’d expect. From there you can type any part of a name into the search box or click a letter to browse. As of this writing, there are 15,093 artists in the index; the 5,986 of them with more than one song are the ones you see by default, and there’s a link to include the rest.

Artists rather than credits

The part of this feature that I think matters more is what happened to the artist pages themselves.

Until now, an artist page matched the whole artist field as a phrase, so the Dolly Parton page listed the songs credited to exactly “Dolly Parton” and nothing else. That’s why, in the last post, the best I could offer for “Islands in the Stream” was a link to an advanced search. Now the system reads each credit and pulls the individual artists out of it, so that song sits on Dolly Parton’s page and on Kenny Rogers’ page, and both halves of the credit are links wherever it appears.

Image of the Dolly Parton artist page

Her page picked up four songs it didn’t have before, plus an “Also appears with” line pointing at Kenny Rogers, Ricky Van Shelton, Vince Gill, and Willie Nelson. The credit itself is never rewritten — the song details page still shows exactly what the source said.

This also cleans up the case I’ve been frustrated with since 2016. The Prince pate is now 28 songs, including the ones credited to Prince & The New Power Generation, and Prince Royce is a separate entry in the index with 53 songs of his own, rather than something I have to apologize for in the middle of a search.

Where it falls short

Unsurprisingly, a free-text artist field doesn’t give up its contents easily. I only split a credit where there’s real evidence for it — a “feat.” or a slash, or a name that already carries songs of its own — because the failure I least wanted was a band name torn in half.

The bigger limit isn’t the splitting, though. When I measured our credits against a sample of Spotify’s structured ones, about 28% of the credits in the catalog turn out to involve more than one artist — but 80% of those credit strings contain no separator at all. Spotify knows a song is by two people; our copy of the credit just says the first one. No amount of cleverness gets a name out of a string it isn’t in, so this picks up roughly a fifth of the collaborations that are really out there. Closing the rest of that gap means going back to the services for better data, which is a project for another day.

A couple of smaller things: spelling variants are still separate artists, so P!nk and Pink each have a page, and the index itself rebuilds every few hours, so a brand-new song can take a little while to turn up there (the artist pages are current immediately). And the larger caveat from last time still stands — the artist field is still text, not a proper relational thing with artists as first-class objects. This is the incremental version. It just turns out the incremental version covers most of what I actually wanted.

If you’d like to help

The Artists help page has the full details, including how to correct an artist list on a song. If you land on a page with songs that don’t belong there, or find a credit that clearly should have been split and wasn’t, please let me know. And if you’d enjoy doing some of that cleanup yourself, send me your music4dance username and I’ll turn on editing for your account.

Step of the Month

The  “Step of the Month” for September is still the ask from the last post: which Dolly Parton songs are your favorites to dance to, and what style of dance? I’m particularly interested in hearing from Country Western dancers. Feel free to respond to this post, use the general feedback page, or add the songs and vote on existing songs directly. Her page is a better place to start than it was two weeks ago.

Artists

Every song in the music4dance library carries an artist credit exactly as its source song wrote it — Pitbull feat. Ne-Yo, Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers. That’s the right thing to display, but it’s an awkward thing to browse. If you wanted to know what else Kenny Rogers had recorded,…

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What Are Your Favorite Dolly Parton Songs for Partner Dancing?

Like many, I’m mourning and listening to Dolly Parton’s music. I haven’t written a post related to an artist’s death since Prince left us in 2016. I’m not sure what my internal algorithm is for this, but besides Dolly being such a unifying cultural icon, there is the small detail that I noticed a significant…

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What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

Update 2024: The content of the post is still generally accurate. There is a more recent post that outlines a new feature that adds yet another way to narrow down songs that have “Prince” in the artist’s name. New Feature: Improved Text Searching I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and…

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Searching for Music

What Are Your Favorite Dolly Parton Songs for Partner Dancing?

Like many, I’m mourning and listening to Dolly Parton’s music. I haven’t written a post related to an artist’s death since Prince left us in 2016. I’m not sure what my internal algorithm is for this, but besides Dolly being such a unifying cultural icon, there is the small detail that I noticed a significant uptick in people searching music4dance for “Dolly Parton” over the last few weeks. I don’t have a good way to track statistics on this kind of search, but it was significant enough that random viewing of my diagnostic logs for other issues kept popping up her name. Qualitatively, that’s pretty amazing and hasn’t happened before.

So, as the title says – which of her songs are your favorites to dance to? And what style of dance? I’m particularly interested in hearing from Country Western dancers, since I don’t have enough background in those dances to categorize them myself. Feel free to respond to this post, use the general feedback page, or add the songs/vote on existing songs directly. I’d love to see this part of the catalog grow as our small tribute to her memory.

Searching for Artists

As I reviewed Dolly Parton songs, I took another look at how I catalog artists in music4dance. This is similar to what happened when I dug into Prince songs in 2016. In both cases, a review highlighted some of the limitations of that process.

For Prince, I improved the process by adding a feature that showed all the songs with an artist field containing exactly “Prince.” That narrowed down the results to only his songs. But it was a bit too narrow in that it excluded songs where the artist field contained a band name or a collaborator. But as in much of this work, I aim for incremental improvement and wait for feedback before investing more time.

A few years back, I returned to the searching for artist issue due to another spike in artist searches – this one for a different reason – Dancing With the Stars aired episodes featuring the music of Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift. Initially, I wrote a blog post about what I saw as the limitations, but asked for feedback before proceeding.

A few months later, I implemented improved text searching based on that feedback, adding more capabilities to chip away at the problem. In the case of Dolly Parton, you could now search for all songs that contain Dolly Parton in the artist field. That pulls in everything you see on the Dolly Parton artist page, as well as collaborations with Kenny Rogers, Vince Gill, Willie Nelson, etc. But not songs that have Dolly in the title, like the multiple versions of Hello Dolly! It’s a little less successful for Prince, mostly because other artists such as Prince Royce show up in that search.

An Incremental Improvement

The other issue is that you have to know about the advanced search option for this to work at all. I decided to make an incremental improvement to discoverability. When you land on the Dolly Parton page, it implies the page will list all the Dolly Parton songs in the catalog. So I added a link near the top of the page –Search all songs with “Dolly Parton” in the artist field – to indicate that there may be more Dolly Parton songs available and to provide a smooth path for getting to that list.

What Next?

I think the two biggest remaining gaps are some form of Artist Index and the fact that I’m still keeping the artist field as free text rather than setting up a relational database where artists are a first-class object and songs can be related to multiple artists.

Now that I’m thinking about this again, I’m pretty sure I’ll implement an Artist Index of some kind in the foreseeable future. I’m unlikely to tackle the relational database solution anytime soon, but I might make incremental improvements to how I handle the artist field.

What do you think? Do you run into issues searching for artists? Or are there other improvements to search or elsewhere that you would prioritize over these? Feedback is always welcome.

Step of the Month

The “Step of the Month” for September is the same as the ask at the beginning of this post. Which Dolly Parton songs are your favorites to dance to? And what style of dance? Feel free to respond to this post, use the general feedback page, or add the songs/vote on existing songs directly. I’d love to see this part of the catalog grow as our small tribute to her memory.

New Feature: Improved Text Searching

I’ve always been a bit dissatisfied with how I set up the Artist field in music4dance.  A free text field for the artist generally works, but it doesn’t capture everything I’d like.  But since the core functionality of music4dance is to associate songs with dance styles, keeping the rest of the system simple is a…

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What are your favorite Prince songs for partner dancing?

Update 2024: The content of the post is still generally accurate. There is a more recent post that outlines a new feature that adds yet another way to narrow down songs that have “Prince” in the artist’s name. New Feature: Improved Text Searching I, like many, am mourning and listening to Prince’s music. Over and…

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Ballroom Dancing to Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift

The recent Dancing With the Stars episodes featuring Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift’s music caused a significant spike in traffic at music4dance.net, with dancers looking for music by those artists. I find this exciting for many reasons.  There’s the obvious reason that more traffic means more people showing interest in this project.  It also reinforces…

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About music4dance

Enhanced Feature: Editing Tempos and Deleting Tags

1 Comment

Based on some of the comments on my last post, I’ve been thinking more about my early decisions concerning who can edit various aspects of a song in the music4dance catalog. I was worried that malicious actors would mess with the data, and spent considerable time designing and implementing a system that lets me roll back all edits for a specific user if I find they’re up to no good.

Oddly, I have had to spend significant energy dealing with bad actors who have been attempting to hack the site. But they’re all about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the music and dance data. I haven’t once had to back out dance votes by someone trying to break the system. I think I was overly influenced by stories about moderating issues on Wikipedia (which was relatively new at the time), and by my personal history with programmers fighting over whether three or four spaces is the “right” number to represent a tab in C.

And in my defense, dancers are often very opinionated about the definitions of dances and what is “appropriate” music to dance them to (e.g. Why is the tempo range you list for West Coast Swing wrong? and Why are the tempos that music4dance lists for Salsa wrong?). But most of what I see in those cases are angry emails about how I’ve gotten it wrong.

In the spirit of assuming that the members of the community are well-intentioned and knowledgeable (or at least self-assess well as to the limits of their knowledge), I’ve changed a couple of things about the Dance Details pages.

Tempo Editing

Some time ago, I started preferring human tempo edits over algorithmic ones. But I was only allowing a few vetted moderators to edit tempos. I’ve now opened tempo editing up to all registered users. So if you see a tempo that doesn’t make sense for a song, please go to the Song Details page (generally by clicking on the song title in search results or lists) and click the pencil icon next to the tempo. That will put the song into edit mode, and you should be able to edit the tempo. Don’t forget to save when you’re done!

If you are signed in and don’t see the pencil icon next to the tempo, it is probably because I, or another user, has already manually edited the tempo. You can generally tell this is the case by looking at the changes section in song details. If this happens frequently, I’ll consider building a moderation system of some kind, but in the meantime, please just contact me with your thoughts on the tempo and why, and we can work it out.

One special case the system can’t handle yet is when two very different dances can be danced to the same song at different tempos. I’m getting close to pulling the trigger on a solution for that, so if you come across any of these, please let me know – the more examples I have, the more general I’ll be able to make the solution.

Tag Deletion

Another attribute of song editing that’s only been accessible to select moderators in the past is the ability to delete tags created by other users. But, like tempo, the algorithms sometimes get the meter wrong (labeling something as 4/4 that should be 3/4, or vice versa). I’m also not thrilled about how broadly musical genres are applied, so I’d be happy if anyone would be willing to go in and trim some of those down. Again, generally, I’m going to assume that a discerning human user will do a better job than the algorithm. I’m also limiting this feature to deleting algorithmically created tags, not tags created by another user, for reasons similar to the Tempo Editing feature.

In order to remove tags, just click on the pencil icon at the end of the tag list on the Song Details page. The single list of tags will split into two lists, one labeled “Remove Tags.” This list contains the tags that you’ve added + the algorithmically generated tags. Clicking on the (x) icon in the tag will remove it. Again, don’t forget to save. And again, if you don’t see a tag in the Remove list that you expect, it’s probably because another user, not an algorithm, added the tag. You should be able to confirm this by looking at the changes section. Please contact me in such cases, and I’ll resolve them manually.

Step of the Month:

As I noted previously, I’ve traditionally closed out these posts with a generic ask to check out the contributions page and to please send feedback on anything in the post or your general thoughts. That’s been less effective than I like, so I’m pivoting. Each month, I’ll choose one specific ask that may or may not be on the contributions page lists, but would really help keep music4dance and the community strong. I’ve decided to call this section “Step of the Month” – a play on dance steps and steps to help – and see if that gets a response. If the response is to hold your nose and run away from plays on words, please let me know that, too.

The “Step of the Month” for April is to vote on songs that you like to dance to. This will make the catalog more useful for everyone.

Thanks, everyone, for your continued support.

What Happens When a Song is Danced at Different Tempos?

Sometimes, a song can be a perfectly good Bolero when heard one way but a Salsa when counting the music differently. Another example is Slow Dance (Castle Foxtrot) vs. Lindy Hop. Generally, this phenomenon is because, with some music, it’s easy to count what the musicians see as either a half note or a quarter…

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Is music4dance becoming too popular?

I first published music4dance in 2013 and, within a year or so, started seeing traffic measurable in the thousands of active users per month. Usage plateaued there for over a decade, but last year, the numbers started climbing rapidly – into ranges better measured in tens of thousands. Now these are very rough measures from…

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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 may have added. Below is a snapshot of a song details page for “How Sweet it Is” as seen by a user, “Charles”, while he is viewing it. Some of the features…

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Searching for Music

Updated Feature: Search History

3 Comments

As promised, I’ve done a bit more thinking about how to help folks who are going through long lists of search results, possibly generated by complicated searches. Most of what I ended up doing centers on a feature I’ve been calling “My Searches.” I realized as I started digging into this that I had already made some improvements to this feature based on feedback. But I never got around to blogging about that, so if you haven’t looked at this feature recently, it’s quite a bit different.

What is My Searches?

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been very consistent in the terminology I use for this feature. In previous posts and on the help page, I’ve called this feature “Saved Searches,” and in the user interface, it’s called “My Searches.” It is also easy to look at this as a search history.

If you’re signed in, music4dance saves your searches, and you can see the list of the most recent searches you’ve done in the “My Searches” menu under the profile menu in the top right of the page. I don’t remember exactly when I implemented this feature, but the last major update was in 2022, and I’m guessing the initial implementation was several years before that.

Improvements:

A couple of things I added to make this feature more manageable were to allow you to delete searches you’re not particularly interested in and to associate each search with the Spotify playlist it was created from. In this most recent round, you can also filter on searches that you’ve created Spotify playlists from.

Based on feedback about returning to a specific page in a search, the system now stores the most recent page you’ve seen in each search, which will appear in your list as a separate button.

While I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that one of the biggest issues with this feature is that people don’t know it exists. So, under the Tools menu, I added a “Search History” item and a “Resume Search” item. If you’re signed in, “Search History” just takes you to the “My Searches” page, and “Resume Search” takes you to the most recent page of the last search you ran. If you’re not signed in, you see a message to register or sign in to use the feature.

I’ve also added a “Delete All” option to remove all your searches from the database.

What’s Next:

I’ll likely pause on this feature for now, but please let me know if there are any aspects that would work better for you. Some of my thoughts:

  • I only show the top 250 most recent or most used searches. I could make this pageable like search results.
  • I only do this for non-trivial searches, so if you’re going through all the Waltzes in the catalog, you won’t see the search in your saved searches, and the new menu item will take you to your most recent “non-trivial” search, not the full list of Waltzes.
  • I could enable opting out of this feature and not store your searches.
  • I could enable adding searches to your favorites and filter on favorites (which gets a little closer to “Saved Search” vs. “Search History.”)

Step of the Month:

I’ve traditionally closed out these posts with a generic ask to check out the contributions page and to please send feedback on anything in the post or your general thoughts. That’s been less effective than I like, so I’m going to pivot. Each month, I’ll choose one specific ask, which may or may not be on the contributions page lists, but would really help keep music4dance and the community strong. I’ve decided to call this section “Step of the Month” – a play on dance steps and steps to help – and see if that gets a response. If the response is to hold your nose and run away from plays on words, please let me know that, too.

The “Step of the Month” for March is to please follow music4dance on Spotify. This helps gain visibility and attract new participants to the community.

Thanks, everyone, for your continued support.

Searching for Music

New Feature: Go to Page (or I want to get to the 50th page in 77 pages of Waltz results)

1 Comment

One response to a recent post about Advanced Search options was:

One thing I would like on the website in general is: I am someone who is slowly making my way through all of the dance music selections for the dance styles I’m interested in. I would like it very much if there was a way I could go directly to the page at which I stop instead of having to navigate slowly to the page I want. For example, if let’s say I stop on page 50, and when I return to the task again at another time and want to start on page 51, it takes many clicks to get there.

I responded with ways to hack the URL to reach a particular page in search results, and I still think saving the URL via a browser bookmark or your note-taking system of choice is probably the best answer to the specific question.  The URL encodes all of the details of the search, including the page that you’re currently on, so you get right back to where you left off.

However, the pagination system is a feature I implemented in 2012 and haven’t revisited1 in detail since. At the time, the default pagination control that came with the UI library I was using worked perfectly well for the at most dozen (and generally more like two) pages of search results. That’s obviously not the case anymore.

I have been noodling with moving to an infinite scrolling system. This is the way many sites have moved to when presenting search results, and it would solve some other issues I’ve been having with limitations of the core indexing system I’m using. So, besides nudging me towards a more obvious way to go to a specific page in the search results, this comment may have stopped me from investing in an alternative scheme that would have made this even harder. Thank you!

I am going to continue to think about this some more. Including options like making the “my searches” list encode the page that you were last on. I don’t want to keep the page as a core part of the saved searches, since I want to show you the searches you do most frequently, but this shouldn’t prevent me from keeping a separate field for the most recently visited page for each search.

But the absolutely straightforward answer is to replace the textual indication of what page you’re on with an editable number. I did that, so now hopefully new users can easily get to a specific page in their results without digging too deeply.

Image of search results footer with editable page number

Just type the page you want to in the edit control, press Enter/Return, and the new page will load.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

  1. Ironically, I’ve re-implemented the exact same system a couple of times, once when moving to Vue.js, and again when moving to Vue3 and BootstrapVueNext. Even more ironically, getting the pagination control to work correctly in BootstrapVueNext was my first major contribution to that project… ↩︎

What is Your Favorite music4dance Feature? (2024 Edition)

I am in the middle of another substantial rewrite of parts of music4dance.net. This is why you haven’t seen much blogging or new features recently. Sorry! In any case, I should ask this question at least once a year: What do you like about music4dance, and how do you use the site? As I rework…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

What is Your Favorite music4dance Feature?

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…

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Advanced Search

The advanced search form can be found by clicking on the “Advanced Search” item in the “Music” menu or by clicking on the “Advanced Search” link on the song list page. Keywords:  Type portions or song title, artist name or any other text shown on a song page. You may also drag and drop or paste…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Searching for Music

The Dancers I DJ for don’t enjoy long songs. How do I find good Salsa songs that are under three minutes?

3 Comments

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.”

Advanced Song 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?

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

New Feature: Filter by Song Length

If you’re trying to get a playlist together for a social dance, it would be nice for the songs to be a reasonable length for your audience.  I realize that DJ tools will let you manage this in multiple ways, but sometimes it’s just easier to start with songs in the length range you’d like. There are…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Advanced Search

The advanced search form can be found by clicking on the “Advanced Search” item in the “Music” menu or by clicking on the “Advanced Search” link on the song list page. Keywords:  Type portions or song title, artist name or any other text shown on a song page. You may also drag and drop or paste…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Search like Google Part III: Advanced Search – The Best of Both Worlds?

Update (July 2024): This underlying search mechanism described in this series of posts is still in place and functions as described here, but the user interface has changed. Please see the Simple Search and Advanced Search documentation for how the current user interface works. I’ve just updated the music4dance site with the remaining features for…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Searching for Music

What if I want to find just Cha Chas tagged as American Style?

1 Comment

Or one of the many variations, such as Slow Foxtrots labeled as “Traditional,” or Boleros labeled as “fast”?

Queries like the above have always been possible, but with a very major caveat. Up until now, you could search on Cha Cha dance and “American” style. But what that did was find all songs that had a net Cha Cha vote of at least one and a tag on any dance of “American” style. So if someone voted on a song as Rumba and tagged the Rumba as American, then someone else voted for the song as Cha Cha, searching on Cha Cha and American would include that song.

This behavior was particularly troublesome if you wanted to do something like search for fast Salsas, because you’d end up with songs that are fast Rumbas or Cha Chas, but slow Salsas, which is precisely what you don’t want. Side note: the workaround for that particular issue is to search on specific tempos, but that isn’t really the same as searching for songs that someone explicitly tagged as slow or fast for a particular dance, since there is more thought put into tagging (and not every song has a tempo associated with it).

I’ve done a bunch of restructuring and added more than a bit of UI to enable the kinds of searches that I’m describing here. I’m currently busy updating the documentation to catch up, but I hope that the fundamental change is relatively intuitive.

There have always been two kinds of tags: tags on songs and tags on top of a dance style for a song. I’m gravitating to calling the latter dance-specific tags, although I haven’t been 100% consistent yet. If you go to any of the dance details pages (try Slow Waltz), you’ll see two tag clouds now, labeled Dance Tags and Song Tags. Clicking on any of the tags in the Dance (specific) Tags section will give you the option to list the songs with that tag on Rumba.

Alternatively, you can navigate to the Advanced Search page, add Rumba to the list of dances, toggle the “Show Dance Details” switch, and select the option to include the American tag. In either case, you’ll end up with this result. Or we can answer the original question of All Cha Cha songs tagged as “American” style.

In any case, this is a very large new feature that includes a breaking schema change in the search index, so there are bound to be bugs. Please poke at it and let me know what you think. I’m doing my best to enable the deep scenarios that you ask for without overly complicating the core scenarios. Part of what I’m trying to do is what I alluded to in my last post, where I made a reference to making it easier to add refinements to dance searches, so that you can more accurately find all American Style Slow Foxtrots – once could theoretically do something similar with Country Cha Chas (which aren’t currently supported at all).

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

New Feature: Searching on songs with a minimum number of dance votes

Several folks have been frustrated with the number of songs in the music4dance catalog that only have one or two votes for a particular dance style. This limitation doesn’t matter for many searches because you can sort by dance votes, and the most popular songs end up at the top. But if you want to…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

New Dance: Single Swing

I’ve added Single Swing as a dance style that can be searched on and voted for in the music4dance catalog. While I think of this dance as a short-cut to use when I want to dance East Coast Swing to faster Jive or Lindy-Hop music, I’ve received enough feedback from the community that it’s considered a unique dance in its own right that…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

“Search like Google” is now the default

Update (July 2024): This underlying search mechanism described in this series of posts is still in place and functions as described here, but the user interface has changed. Please see the Simple Search and Advanced Search documentation for how the current user interface works. I’ve just updated the music4dance site to make the new search engine the…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Searching for Music

New Feature: Searching on songs with a minimum number of dance votes

Several folks have been frustrated with the number of songs in the music4dance catalog that only have one or two votes for a particular dance style. This limitation doesn’t matter for many searches because you can sort by dance votes, and the most popular songs end up at the top.

But if you want to sort by something else, such as tempo or date modified, you’re out of luck. That is until now.

I’ve added a feature in advanced search that enhances the ability to filter by dance. Previously, you could filter only on whether a song had a net of at least one vote for a dance style. Now, you can filter on any threshold. So, if I want to create a list of all songs with at least three votes (net) between 160 and 180 beats per measure sorted by date added, I can do that now.

Here’s how:

  1. Go to Advanced Search
  2. Choose Salsa in the Dance filter
  3. Click on Show Thresholds
  4. Click on the “+” next to Salsa twice to increase the threshold to 3
  5. Change the tempo range to 160-180
  6. Choose “When Added” for the “Sort By” field
Advanced Search with Dance Thresholds
Advanced Search with Dance Thresholds example

Let me know what you think. Are there other ways you would use this kind of filter? Is there any reason to filter out the most voted for songs? That’s certainly possible, but I didn’t see a use case for that.

In addition to the specific ask above, I’m always happy to hear ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.