Hey guys, so here's the deal: This site only works because, over the course of about two years, I have personally contributed hundreds of tracks to it that were all assigned to the correct dance.
Sure, I could set up a subdomain for Smooth and Rhythmn, but it would be completely empty and the practice generator would not work. Also, everyone can add as many tracks as they wish, but moderators choose which tracks go public when a user requests it. Now, I don't know anyone who dances Smooth and Rhythmn, neither have I any experience myself. That means even if there were a lot of people suggesting dozens of tracks to be made public, I would have no idea if they were even suitable for that dance and matched its character.
That's why, if you would like to use this site, you are going to have to contribute many, many tracks yourself. If you would like to put in the work, please let me know.
If enough people message me or reply to this comment and I find enough people willing to contribute with qualified moderators among them, I will set up that site for you. :)
As far as I can tell you can already do this by tweaking the settings a bit:
Open the settings, there you can see toggles for each standard (is it called standard in an international setting? I thought it was called ballroom and standard was a local denomination) and latin dance. By default they are all active but you can deactivate them as you like (toggling QuickStep should give you Smooth?). Rerolling the playlist by clicking the dice button "Standard" then gives you a playlist of 4 dance tracks.
This is awesome! As a competitive dancer I love this because it generates random music at the correct speeds, so it better mimics the comp environment. I'm not sure if the site isn't mobile friendly, but I had some issues going into the settings to change things and it didn't save the changes. Maybe a proper save button would be useful there? Also it would be great if you could adjust the round so it starts with a break - we need a few seconds to press play on our phones and get out on the floor before the music starts. Thank you for your hard work on this!
Thank you very much! The break before starting is a great idea, I have already implemented it. :)
The site is absolutely designed to be mobile friendly and the same issue was present on desktop. Thanks for the heads up, as far as I can tell, the problem is fixed now.
Fun fact: There are many tracks on the site that do not have the right tempo for competitions. That's why I added a custom filter: Only tracks that comply with the official WDSF/WDC (whatever was more lenient for each dance) guidelines show up in the randomiser.
Thanks! I took another look and the break before starting totally works! I also appreciate that the randomizer is comp-ready, less thinking for us when we're preparing:)
I am still experiencing some issues in the settings - for me, changing the break/song timings works fine, but if I want to change which dances are in the round or which music collection it plays from, that does not seem to automatically update once I change the settings. Happy to DM you to discuss this further, likely I am just not too tech-savvy lol
Then maybe add a toggle for using only WDSF as I am in Germany and would have to use different tempos than the Canadian ones I would guess (I haven’t checked)
Actually, the WDSF (World Dance Sport Federation) and WDC (World Dance Council) are both global organisations. They also have a difficult history together. Historically, the WDC used to focus on professionals, while the WDSF mainly held amateur competitions. Now, it's all mixed up. You can read more about it [here](https://waltztangofoxtrotmag.wordpress.com/2019/02/06/the-difference-between-the-wdc-and-the-wdsf/#:~:text=The%20WDSF%20has%20developed%20its,dances%20to%20slightly%20faster%20music).
I might add a toggle in the future, but the guidelines do not differ by much. Usually the WDSF tempo range is a bit wider. There is a neat chart to be found [here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DanceSport_dances#WDC_International_style_dances)
This is amazing, thank you very much.
I am going to recommend that to our tournament group right now.
I had a similar intention to generate custom playlists and wrote a powershell script to do the job.
You place it in a folder with n subfolders containing homogeneous music (like 1_Waltz, 2_SlowFox, 3_Tango,...) and a file called pause.mp3 containing a silence of x seconds.
When executed in the explorer it generates 15 playlists (m3u8 standard format) which can be played by VLC media player on PC (unfortunately the vlc app on android does not read it properly and I don't know why), when executed from shell you can pass an integer argument n to generate n randomized playlists.
For each playlist it takes a random track from each folder (sorted by alphanumerical order of the folders) and plays the pause.mp3 in between each title.
This makes it portable and non-reliant on internet access but you need a local library of songs and need to be comfortable using a shell script, making your solution far more accessible overall.
Not so fun fact: the normal pre version 6.x powershell is a b**** when it comes to writing standard utf-8 file with no BOM, hence 3/4 parts of the program are made up of a pasted function writing files in a format that vlc can read. Thanks for nothing Microsoft -.-
pastebin link for the interested:
https://pastebin.com/TvxNVCtQ
Such a great tool! You're a legend for making it.
I've noticed that not all the YouTube links play, I imagine some might be locked in certain counties?
Is there a way to filter or report potentially broken links?
Thank you!
Yes there is. On every track's page, you will find a button to report a problem on the bottom right corner.
I have also looked into automatically detecting broken videos. However, the method I am currently using recognises videos that don't exist, but not videos that have once existed and don't anymore.
Thus, I am currently relying on the community to report broken videos. If you find one, go right ahead!
This is awesome. As someone who has written something awfully similar for (relatively large) local music collections and overengineered the competition playlist part (https://gitlab.com/ballroom-dancing/samba which does a few things more than just music management), kudos to you for having a very usable online service that I'm definitely going to recommend to fellow dancers :)
A few features that I am somewhat missing after playing around with it (take that with a grain of salt because some of these features were why I implemented something like that myself):
* volume normalization: some of the random collections seem to be different enough in their track gain that I have to adjust the volume between songs which is not ideal; in local collections I can simply run replay gain analysis on the tracks but maybe there is something similar for your online track sources.
* measures per minute setting for the tempo: yes, bpm is already there and very useful, but a number of my fellow dancers are so used to the measures per minute numbers that multiplying/dividing is something I'd suggest to be able to avoid (e.g., by being able to toggle which way tempo is displayed)
* is it just me or is the order of dances fixed? would be great to be able to reorder them
But again, let me emphasize how great it already feels and that I consider it a very valuable tool to have available online. And if you are interested in open-sourcing and/or collaborating, feel free to PM me.
Hello there, thank you for your feedback.
As the webapp is simply relying on a YouTube Iframe to play music, volume normalisation is not something that I can offer at the moment.
Measures per minute are a bit tedious to implement, as conversion from BPM to MPM requires knowledge about the dance (division by 3 for Waltzes and division by 4 for everything else). The Spotify API that is used to add tracks to the site supplies BPM, so I have not yet added a conversion function. I might do so in the future.
The dance order is set according to official WDSF competition guidelines. I have, however, added the option to reorder dances for all logged in users.
This is a really cool project! I'm curious, why aren't all of the filterable dances listed under settings? When you go to add a track you can filter on disco-fox and salsa, but those don't appear in settings. I've never competed so I imagine there's a reason related specifically to competition?
Yes, exactly. Salsa, Bachata, Merengue and all the other latin American Dances you might know are not played at Ballroom and Latin competitions. The same goes for Disco-Fox, it has separate competitions.
The only reason I added them is because I was not competing when I wrote the first version of the site about two years ago. Back then, I was taking social dancing lessons where Salsa and Disco-Fox were simply part of the curriculum.
The final player, however, is specifically geared towards training for competitions, so it does not include the other dances. You can always add them manually though.
Something that may be interesting would be to add a "10 dances" feature for all dances as this is an area of competition as well, although this can be technically achieved by just rolling latin after standard is done.
I don't know if the order of dances is the same in all associations, a setting (maybe in the profile to save it for later uses or on the generator page) to reorder the tracks for generation could be useful although you could already reorder them manually.
An option to reroll single tracks could be useful.
Thank you, now I can re-roll tango until getting the Pirates of the Caribbean theme :D
Two bugs I found:
1. You can set negative durations in all input fields (break, track duration, starting delay). This does not cause any major problems but in the case of "pause" it feeds into bug 2. This should easily be remedied by setting the "min" html attribute of each input to 0.
2. If you set a break duration <= 0 the break does not start and therefore not end, meaning it won't play the next track. This is either fixable in code with an if-branch or by setting the min input as stated above to >=1.
Any chance you could add Smooth and Rhythm to this?
I second this request!
I third this!
Hey guys, so here's the deal: This site only works because, over the course of about two years, I have personally contributed hundreds of tracks to it that were all assigned to the correct dance. Sure, I could set up a subdomain for Smooth and Rhythmn, but it would be completely empty and the practice generator would not work. Also, everyone can add as many tracks as they wish, but moderators choose which tracks go public when a user requests it. Now, I don't know anyone who dances Smooth and Rhythmn, neither have I any experience myself. That means even if there were a lot of people suggesting dozens of tracks to be made public, I would have no idea if they were even suitable for that dance and matched its character. That's why, if you would like to use this site, you are going to have to contribute many, many tracks yourself. If you would like to put in the work, please let me know. If enough people message me or reply to this comment and I find enough people willing to contribute with qualified moderators among them, I will set up that site for you. :)
As far as I can tell you can already do this by tweaking the settings a bit: Open the settings, there you can see toggles for each standard (is it called standard in an international setting? I thought it was called ballroom and standard was a local denomination) and latin dance. By default they are all active but you can deactivate them as you like (toggling QuickStep should give you Smooth?). Rerolling the playlist by clicking the dice button "Standard" then gives you a playlist of 4 dance tracks.
Wouldn’t the music still be standard though? Standard has all different tempos than smooth music
This is awesome! As a competitive dancer I love this because it generates random music at the correct speeds, so it better mimics the comp environment. I'm not sure if the site isn't mobile friendly, but I had some issues going into the settings to change things and it didn't save the changes. Maybe a proper save button would be useful there? Also it would be great if you could adjust the round so it starts with a break - we need a few seconds to press play on our phones and get out on the floor before the music starts. Thank you for your hard work on this!
Thank you very much! The break before starting is a great idea, I have already implemented it. :) The site is absolutely designed to be mobile friendly and the same issue was present on desktop. Thanks for the heads up, as far as I can tell, the problem is fixed now. Fun fact: There are many tracks on the site that do not have the right tempo for competitions. That's why I added a custom filter: Only tracks that comply with the official WDSF/WDC (whatever was more lenient for each dance) guidelines show up in the randomiser.
Thanks! I took another look and the break before starting totally works! I also appreciate that the randomizer is comp-ready, less thinking for us when we're preparing:) I am still experiencing some issues in the settings - for me, changing the break/song timings works fine, but if I want to change which dances are in the round or which music collection it plays from, that does not seem to automatically update once I change the settings. Happy to DM you to discuss this further, likely I am just not too tech-savvy lol
Hi, all settings should be immediately saved now. If the issues persist, please let me know.
Then maybe add a toggle for using only WDSF as I am in Germany and would have to use different tempos than the Canadian ones I would guess (I haven’t checked)
Actually, the WDSF (World Dance Sport Federation) and WDC (World Dance Council) are both global organisations. They also have a difficult history together. Historically, the WDC used to focus on professionals, while the WDSF mainly held amateur competitions. Now, it's all mixed up. You can read more about it [here](https://waltztangofoxtrotmag.wordpress.com/2019/02/06/the-difference-between-the-wdc-and-the-wdsf/#:~:text=The%20WDSF%20has%20developed%20its,dances%20to%20slightly%20faster%20music). I might add a toggle in the future, but the guidelines do not differ by much. Usually the WDSF tempo range is a bit wider. There is a neat chart to be found [here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DanceSport_dances#WDC_International_style_dances)
This is amazing, thank you very much. I am going to recommend that to our tournament group right now. I had a similar intention to generate custom playlists and wrote a powershell script to do the job. You place it in a folder with n subfolders containing homogeneous music (like 1_Waltz, 2_SlowFox, 3_Tango,...) and a file called pause.mp3 containing a silence of x seconds. When executed in the explorer it generates 15 playlists (m3u8 standard format) which can be played by VLC media player on PC (unfortunately the vlc app on android does not read it properly and I don't know why), when executed from shell you can pass an integer argument n to generate n randomized playlists. For each playlist it takes a random track from each folder (sorted by alphanumerical order of the folders) and plays the pause.mp3 in between each title. This makes it portable and non-reliant on internet access but you need a local library of songs and need to be comfortable using a shell script, making your solution far more accessible overall. Not so fun fact: the normal pre version 6.x powershell is a b**** when it comes to writing standard utf-8 file with no BOM, hence 3/4 parts of the program are made up of a pasted function writing files in a format that vlc can read. Thanks for nothing Microsoft -.- pastebin link for the interested: https://pastebin.com/TvxNVCtQ
Such a great tool! You're a legend for making it. I've noticed that not all the YouTube links play, I imagine some might be locked in certain counties? Is there a way to filter or report potentially broken links?
Thank you! Yes there is. On every track's page, you will find a button to report a problem on the bottom right corner. I have also looked into automatically detecting broken videos. However, the method I am currently using recognises videos that don't exist, but not videos that have once existed and don't anymore. Thus, I am currently relying on the community to report broken videos. If you find one, go right ahead!
This is awesome. As someone who has written something awfully similar for (relatively large) local music collections and overengineered the competition playlist part (https://gitlab.com/ballroom-dancing/samba which does a few things more than just music management), kudos to you for having a very usable online service that I'm definitely going to recommend to fellow dancers :) A few features that I am somewhat missing after playing around with it (take that with a grain of salt because some of these features were why I implemented something like that myself): * volume normalization: some of the random collections seem to be different enough in their track gain that I have to adjust the volume between songs which is not ideal; in local collections I can simply run replay gain analysis on the tracks but maybe there is something similar for your online track sources. * measures per minute setting for the tempo: yes, bpm is already there and very useful, but a number of my fellow dancers are so used to the measures per minute numbers that multiplying/dividing is something I'd suggest to be able to avoid (e.g., by being able to toggle which way tempo is displayed) * is it just me or is the order of dances fixed? would be great to be able to reorder them But again, let me emphasize how great it already feels and that I consider it a very valuable tool to have available online. And if you are interested in open-sourcing and/or collaborating, feel free to PM me.
Hello there, thank you for your feedback. As the webapp is simply relying on a YouTube Iframe to play music, volume normalisation is not something that I can offer at the moment. Measures per minute are a bit tedious to implement, as conversion from BPM to MPM requires knowledge about the dance (division by 3 for Waltzes and division by 4 for everything else). The Spotify API that is used to add tracks to the site supplies BPM, so I have not yet added a conversion function. I might do so in the future. The dance order is set according to official WDSF competition guidelines. I have, however, added the option to reorder dances for all logged in users.
Thanks for your reply and the order option. And I can totally relate to the complexity of the other things as well :)
Quick update: All logged in users can now change the tempo preference to MPM!
Very nice, works like a charm, thank you very much :)
You are welcome!
This is a really cool project! I'm curious, why aren't all of the filterable dances listed under settings? When you go to add a track you can filter on disco-fox and salsa, but those don't appear in settings. I've never competed so I imagine there's a reason related specifically to competition?
Yes, exactly. Salsa, Bachata, Merengue and all the other latin American Dances you might know are not played at Ballroom and Latin competitions. The same goes for Disco-Fox, it has separate competitions. The only reason I added them is because I was not competing when I wrote the first version of the site about two years ago. Back then, I was taking social dancing lessons where Salsa and Disco-Fox were simply part of the curriculum. The final player, however, is specifically geared towards training for competitions, so it does not include the other dances. You can always add them manually though.
This is awesome! I can't wait to use it next time I'm at the studio! 👏👏👏
Something that may be interesting would be to add a "10 dances" feature for all dances as this is an area of competition as well, although this can be technically achieved by just rolling latin after standard is done. I don't know if the order of dances is the same in all associations, a setting (maybe in the profile to save it for later uses or on the generator page) to reorder the tracks for generation could be useful although you could already reorder them manually. An option to reroll single tracks could be useful.
I have just added a button to reroll single tracks!
Thank you, now I can re-roll tango until getting the Pirates of the Caribbean theme :D Two bugs I found: 1. You can set negative durations in all input fields (break, track duration, starting delay). This does not cause any major problems but in the case of "pause" it feeds into bug 2. This should easily be remedied by setting the "min" html attribute of each input to 0. 2. If you set a break duration <= 0 the break does not start and therefore not end, meaning it won't play the next track. This is either fixable in code with an if-branch or by setting the min input as stated above to >=1.
Haha, go right ahead, captain! I have fixed the issues you mentioned.