Filtering on song length is one of the most requested/appreciated features from the DeeJay/Music coordinator crowd. It’s also one of the first features I implemented in a round of requests I received from exchanges from this segment of the music4dance community - you can read about that in this post. Since then, it has come up quite a few times, mostly as a “hey, this is one of the things I really love about music4dance,” and once or twice as a “it would be great if you implemented this feature,” in which case I get to gently (but gleefully inside) steer the questioner to the “

Someone recently asked me to add a feature that shows when a song was added to the music4dance catalog. It turns out this feature already exists, but the fact that this person didn’t realize it means it isn’t as obvious as it should be. This is especially true, given that the questioner demonstrated she was a fairly sophisticated user of the site through other questions and comments in the same thread.

Some of the most vocal members of the music4dance community are folks who either DJ for their studio’s dances or help build the playlists for their community dances, or some variation of the two. The common thread is that they’re using music4dance at various points in their processes and have been kind enough to share the details with me. This has resulted in a number of features that I am sure help more members of the community than my original interlocutor.

I’ve addressed questions about tempo in several different ways over the years, and I appreciate the continued feedback, as there is absolutely room for improvement in how the music4dance system handles tempo. Algorithms are far from perfect: The issue at hand is that many of the tempos listed for Salsa were exactly half the speed at which one would dance.

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.

Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to dance to. As of this writing, we have 2134 songs cataloged, up from 1759 songs last year and close to doubling the “nearly two hundred” holiday songs I saw when I added the first version of this feature in the…

One of the most common requests I’ve received is to support Country Western dances. That request has come in many forms, but I don’t have personal experience with Country Western dancing (well, that’s not 100% true, I learned to West Coast Swing at a Country bar in downtown Seattle that my ballroom dancer friends would hang out at after rehearsing). I’m nearly certain that in adapting…

We continue to add to the music4dance Halloween song catalog. As of this writing, there are 1151 songs tagged as Halloween with a positive number of dance votes. As I’ve noted in previous posts, we’ve gone from using the general tagging mechanism where you could search on songs that had a musical genre of “Halloween” and a particular dance, to having a dedicated…

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…

I’ve been building music4dance for well over a decade now, and I am still amazed at how passionate people can be about what is right or wrong, not just with respect to dance, but also with many other aspects of the site. Two such instances came up in a recent piece of feedback that I’d like to address, as they are related to ambiguities in language.

A Swing Band leader (Glenn Crytzer) reached out to me recently, asking if it would be possible to add his entire catalog to the music4dance.net database. He found a few of his songs already listed, but has a published catalog of well over a hundred songs, most of which should be danceable to partner dances (mostly Swing…

I've been considering publishing the music4dance source code as open source for some time now. I finally pulled the trigger! You can find the source code for music4dance on GitHub, located at music4dance / music4dance; I've published the code under the MIT License. Note that this covers the code; I haven't published the database. I've documented the new ways (and some pre-existing ways) of contributing to…

Pacific Northwest Ballet included Twila Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs as part of their Director's Choice performance this year. I'm not in any way qualified to review a Ballet performance, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a great time playing with the Ballroom-inspired aspects of the dancing as I watched the show unfold. For me, the idea that the dancing was inspired by ballroom rather than in any way attempting to choreograph actual ballroom dance steps on ballet dancers is what made it work (this is the issue I sometimes have with partner dance in…

When I got into the business of categorizing music by dance style, I knew there would be a lot of ambiguity involved. However, some of the passion behind people’s opinions about what a dance should be called or what tempos are acceptable for the dance called X still takes me by surprise. Several times a year, I get an email from someone who is absolutely livid that I “got the tempo of…

Wedding season is upon us again, so I thought I'd take another run at filling out the music4dance.net wedding dance catalog with wedding spotlight songs cross-referenced by partner/ballroom dance style. It's pretty common to choreograph a first dance, and I've seen mothers and fathers learn a particular style of dance so they could lead/follow their offspring in a partner dance, especially among friends who are part of a social dance or ballroom community.

One of the comments on my last post asked: A lot of our dance groups over here love to dance the partnered dance sea shells The song “Blue night” by Michael learns to Rock sings the song they dance to. Is there a list on your data base of similar songs to that one that they can also dance Sea Shells to?

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).

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.

New Feature: Searching for songs with a minimum number of dance votes Several folks have been frustrated with the number of songs in the music4dance catalog that only have one or two votes for a particular dance style. This limitation doesn’t matter for many searches because you can sort by dance votes, and the most popular songs end up at the top.

The core mission of music4dance.net is to help you find music to dance to, whether you’re a ballroom dancer, social dancer, or really any kind of dancer. Sometimes I look at the site and say, “This could be better.” Or “Here’s a place that I’ve wanted to improve for a while but couldn’t figure out how; maybe I should try something different.” I had an “aha” moment when I was going through the site for my annual…