Tag Archives: Playlist

About music4dance

Add to a Spotify Playlist Directly from music4dance

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A number of people have told me over the years that they create custom Spotify playlists by browsing the music4dance catalog and selecting individual songs. I’ve had ambitions to do all kinds of things to create and manipulate playlists. But it occurred to me, based on a recent conversation, that just the ability to easily add a song you’ve discovered in music4dance to an existing playlist could go a long way towards smoothing out that workflow.

And I thought that would be a relatively easy feature to implement, given that I’ve already built the infrastructure to create a playlist. So I knocked out what I believe is a minimal viable implementation of that feature. It’s live and ready to go, so please give it a try. The documentation is here – but just look for the “add to playlist” button on song pages or in the play menu in search results, and hopefully it’s easy to use from there.

Like the other Spotify playlist feature, it’s a premium feature. If this is the feature that would entice you to purchase a premium subscription, but you want to take it for a test drive, let me know, and I’ll promote your account to premium for a week1.

I haven’t looked recently, but last I checked, it may be possible to do something similar with Apple Music. It would be a pretty heavy lift, though, so I’d need some assurance that a significant number of people would be willing to pay for it. Reach out if you’re interested (not necessarily to pay for it right now, but to say you’d use it in the future if I wrote it).

As always, 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.

Footnotes

  1. I haven’t gone to the trouble of making a trial subscription automatic, so please allow me some turnaround time to manually update your account – if I get enough requests, I’ll code it up. ↩︎

Create a Spotify Playlist

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…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

New Feature: More Spotify Exports

One of the more active members of the music4dance.net community filed a bug report recently, noting that he tried to create a Spotify Playlist, but it came up empty. The playlist was All West Coast Swing (with at least 3 votes) songs having tempo between 100 and 120 beats per minute including songs edited by…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

New Feature: Searching for a song from Spotify or iTunes

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…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
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.

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.

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

9 Comments

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.