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).

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