Tag Archives: BallroomDJ

About music4dance

Playlists for Ballroom DJs?

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I recently heard from a member of the music4dance community who hosts a community social ballroom dance for which he builds a playlist. He uses music4dance to find song ideas, then manually builds a spreadsheet and feeds it back into Spotify to create the final playlist.

I have a long-standing interest in making it easier to build playlists. I still have fond memories of my dance coach handing us a CD of custom-cut practice rounds (this was back in the ‘90s). When I started music4dance, I thought that once I had enough data, I’d be able to do some kind of auto-playlist generator where I randomly chose a high-ranked song from each dance type in a competition round and created a playlist that would be suitable to practice to. Unfortunately, the music4dance database isn’t nearly clean enough to do something like that. I’d need to be able to filter down to just songs that are strict-tempo for each dance, which I’m not even close to being able to do.

I’ve communicated with several DJs who use music4dance to build their playlists. It seems pretty common to want to be able to rotate through a pattern of different dances, so maybe there is some there there. The ability to create heterogeneous playlists of songs appropriate for different dances seems like a helpful feature.

But I’m also loathe to define my own playlist format and land myself in a situation where I’m storing everyone’s playlists. I already spend more time maintaining the music4dance code and systems than adding new features, so I want to be careful about creating features that add to that burden. But that’s not a complete blocker; if this is the way to provide the best user experience, I’d be happy to do it. I’d want to take the time to lock down the requirements before implementing a feature like this.

Hence, this blog post. If you use music4dance to build playlists, how do you do it? And what do you want the format of the end result to be? A Spotify Playlist? A spreadsheet? An integration with the DJ software you use? If so, what software? Please let me know.

In addition to the specific asks 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.

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!