how this started

(apart from the fact that i got into a rabbit hole when i should've been working)

i had an apple music playlist i wanted to share with my students. sharing a youtube playlist sounded much easier than sending people files, but i didn't want to manually search up every song.

obviously, to save time (spoiler: she did not save time), i wrote a script that goes through my playlist and searches youtube for each song automatically. that part worked great. i ended up with a list of youtube urls that was actually kinda reliable.

then i wanted to add the results to an actual youtube playlist, but youtube's api has strict limits you can't get around without paying. so i didn't want to deal with that.

but since i had the urls, i thought: what if i just render them in a youtube iframe? i'll build a quick little player, people can listen, done. and since i had control over the whole thing, i could structure everything as tandas instead of just a flat list of songs.

over time, i filled the database with recordings that already have youtube urls attached. now when you create a tanda, the recordings just show up. you don't have to paste anything manually. they're already there. at least most of them. and if something's missing, you can add it yourself.

and then there's the learn section

this one was kind of a random idea. i found myself having the same conversations about musical properties of tango with different people over and over. orchestras, singers, what to listen for, how things feel different. i'm genuinely obsessed with that stuff and kept collecting little examples and concepts in my head with nowhere to put them.

then i realized: i already have all these youtube links. and youtube lets you set a start and end time on a video. so i can create targeted little snippets, specific moments in specific recordings that illustrate a particular musical feature or concept. i added a loop setting to the player so you can sit with a sample and really hear it.

and since i was already thinking about examples, i thought it would be cool to have a section where you can see people dancing too. so it kind of turned into a small encyclopedia of tango music and movement, all in one place. i like that a lot. it means i don't have to maintain a million playlists and notes scattered everywhere. i can just use this page to document what i'm learning, and when i want to share something with someone, i send them a link. done.

i'm also thinking about adding a section where you can compare the same tango recorded by different orchestras, side by side, and just listen to how they each approach it. that's the kind of thing i want in here.

this is not for djing

i want to be really clear about this: this is not a dj tool. i deliberately designed it that way.

• no cortina spaces. i didn't add gaps between tandas because i don't want someone to hook this up to speakers at a milonga and hit play. that's not what this is for.
• youtube embeds, not audio files. the quality varies. some videos are great, some are okay. for listening and learning, that's fine. for a milonga, absolutely not.

if you want to dj, buy the music and support the labels that preserve these recordings. we have to support the people who preserve this music.

but if you want to learn: to sit with it, to start recognizing orchestras, to develop your ear, to finally understand what everyone means when they talk about the beat, that's what this is for.

how it works

• browse public sets that others have shared, or create your own.
• create sets by searching for songs and organizing them into tandas.
• import a playlist from apple music (export as xml) and it'll auto-detect your tandas and find youtube videos.
• upload a csv if you prefer to build a set that way.
• listen. one song at a time. pay attention to the orchestra, the singer, the year. that's the whole point.

that's it

i hope this makes it a little less confusing to get started.