Tag Archives: iTunes

Beta Feature: Export to a file

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A number of the most active members of the music4dance.net community have requested the ability to download all or part of the song database. My sense is that this has generally been with the intent to tag songs in one’s local catalog with the dance style and other metadata from music4dance. I’ve been stuck trying to implement this for two reasons: First, I’ve put a significant amount of work into the music4dance catalog and don’t necessarily want to let someone download the whole catalog and stand up a competing site. Second, I’m not entirely sure I want to write a desktop application or other tool to tag songs in a personal catalog.

I’m less and less inclined to be worried about the first reason, as I continue to struggle to even cover server costs with subscription and advertising revenue. So if someone has the marketing ability to turn the music4dance catalog into a money-making proposition, I think that would be a good thing. In fact, I’m considering moving to an open-source or non-profit model once I get past a couple of issues with the source that prevent me from making it widely available.

As for the second reason, I realized that providing the information in a reasonably consumable format would allow anyone with a bit of scripting skills and sufficient motivation to do their own tagging. So I don’t have to write a tagging application for this to be useful.

I’ve cobbled together a quick beta feature to let folks play around with exported song lists. I’d love to know if anyone is interested in giving it a whirl before I invest in cleaning up the code to make it a more generally consumable feature. Just contact me, and I’ll set you up.

There are two entry points for this feature. First, in your profile, there is a new link to “export your votes and tags.” This link will generate and download a comma-separated value (CSV) file of all of the songs that you have edited in any way. This file is a denormalized list containing one line per song/dance combination. Each line will have a music4dance song id, title, artist, dance name, Spotify and iTunes links, as well as both your tags and votes and global tags and votes.

The second entry point allows you to download the same information for the first 100 songs of any search you create. This is similar to the ability to create a Spotify playlist I implemented a while back.

Some of the things that I’m interested in feedback on are:

  • Is this denormalized CSV format reasonable, or would another format be more useful (e.g., a normalized JSON format)?
  • Are title/artist or the Spotify/iTunes id sufficient to match your catalog? I’ve looked a bit at using musicbrainz.org ids. But by my reading of their licensing agreement, they want $100 a month donation for commercial use of their catalog, which is a bit steep for the music4dance budget.
  • Is downloading just the top search results or songs you’ve edited sufficient, or are there reasons you would want access to the entire catalog?
  • Is this a feature that would be worth the current annual Premium subscription level of $15? Or more?
  • Are there other ways you would like to use this information?

As always, if you have comments or suggestions, especially if you’d like to try the beta feature discussed above, please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

New Feature: Searching for a song from Spotify or iTunes

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A new member of the music4dance community, Arne, pointed out that he expected to be able to search by Spotify Id. Furthermore, he figured out how to do that by going to the Add Song by Id and dragging the song from Spotify into the edit field on that page.

This is a case of programmer myopia on my part. I wrote all of the code to look up a song in the Spotify and iTunes catalog with the idea of (a) being able to link back to those catalogs and then (b) to make it easier to add songs to the music4dance catalog. I didn’t really think that someone would want to look for a song they were playing in Spotify or Apple Music in the music4dance catalog. Actually – I did, but the way I was thinking about that was a much bigger feature that I may never get around to implementing.

What clicked in my slow programmer brain when I saw Arne’s question was that I had most of the code for a really cool feature but hadn’t seen the opportunity to implement it since I had this much more grandiose feature in my head. After the obligatory forehead slap and exclamation of “Duh!” I set about seeing how easy it would be to use what I had already written to implement a reasonably smooth version of what our Arne was doing.

It was definitely straightforward – a bit of refactoring and a few dozen lines of new code, and I’ve got something that I think is pretty slick. But I’ll let you judge:

When listening to a song in Spotify or  Apple Music, drag the song from the player and drop it into the text box on the top of either the Song Library page or the Advanced Search page. If the song is in the music4dance catalog, we’ll take you directly to the song page and show you what others have voted on to dance to that song. If it’s not already in the library, we’ll give you the option to add the song yourself.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback. As should be obvious from this post, your feedback is essential to making music4dance better. In addition, I read every piece of feedback that comes through and respond to as much as I can. So please share any thoughts and ideas you have about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way that makes sense for you.

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.

Mobile First improvements to the music4dance website

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Most of the time that I use music4dance it’s on desktop computer, but I certainly want access to all of what it can do on my phone and tablet.  And I have tried to take what user interface designers call a “Mobile First” approach whenever possible.

But I noticed a while back that there are a few things that just weren’t working as well on smaller devices as I would like.  Several of them were on the core song list pages, which is particularly important.

So I finally took a couple of days off from other things and reworked these issues.

The Play Menu

The play menu (which is documented here) is now a modal which allows for bigger buttons and the ability to control the sample being played.

Play Menu
Play Menu (on the old site)

Play and Purchase
Play and Purchase Controls (new and improved)

Dance and Tag Menus

I’ve also converted the dance and tag menus (documented here) to modals.  This let me make the buttons bigger as well as adding some styling that I hope will let you navigate through options more easily.  The large chunks of text in the old interface were hard to distinguish even for the person that wrote them.

Dance Menu
Dance Menu (on the old site)

Play Menu
Dance Information (new and improved)

Tag Menu
Tag Menu (on the old site)

Tag Information
Tag Information (new and improved)

Let me know what you think.  Do you prefer the before or after?  Are there other aspects of the site that you find difficult to use on a small device?  Let me know by responding to this post or sending feedback.