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 sabrinaskandy sorted by Dance Rating from most popular to least popular. Staring on page 4. It never occurred to me that someone would want to export a playlist starting from a page other than one. There was a very good reason in this case. He was interested in trying new music, and the top songs in this search were those with which he was generally already familiar.
On a separate track, I’ve been contemplating ways to distinguish the different tiers of the premium subscription. While I want to keep the core functionality of music4dance open to everyone, and I contend that the main reason to pay for a premium subscription is to support the project, I’d like to start building a few things that are nice bonuses for people who provide more financial support.
So, I’ve fixed the bug and now allow folks with a Silver subscription to export from pages other than the first one. While I was at it, I’ve increased the number of songs you can export to a thousand for anyone with a Bronze subscription. Details are available on the subscriptions page.
While I’m here, please let me know if you want to download song and dance information to a file. I have a beta-level feature in place, but I haven’t seen enough interest in the feature to clean it up and get it fully in projection. It’s not a giant lift, so even a few people expressing interest will tip the scales.
In case you’re wondering, the bug turned out to be that I was paging by 100 rather than 25 during export, so the query in question, which only returned 101 songs, produced nothing when starting from the (4-1)*100 = 300th song.
One other nice side effect of the combination of having the total number of dance votes per song indexed and the ability to export larger playlists is that I can now produce a playlist with the Top 1000 songs, based on the total number of dance votes. I don’t know how practical that playlist is, but I find it fun.
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