In DanceMaster, a dance is made up of several pieces. There are, of course, the music file, the cue card file, the voice file and the full cue sheet file, each of which lives in a separate folder on the disk. But there is also the timing file for karaoke cue cards. That lives in the cue card folder. And there is all the data that you entered on the Dance Details screen - the Phase, Rhythm, Choreographer, Plus Figures, etc. That lives inside your database file (DMRounds.mdb). Now this is all well and good as far as DanceMaster is concerned, but if you want to move a dance to another computer, it is a royal pain in the neck. If you enter new dances on your desktop computer, how do you copy them to your laptop? (Answer: Very tediously.) And unless you are very careful, you will probably either have to re-enter the data when you get them there or else loose some of your dance history.
That is why Dance Modules were invented.
A Dance Module consists of ALL the pieces of a dance rolled up into one tidy, easy-to-move file. Al the music, cues, data, timing, etc. get packaged up to make a Dance Module. DanceMaster Dance Modules (DM2) are named using the name of the dance they contain, plus an extension of ".DM2". (I.e. "Hang On Little Tomato.dm2") They are compressed, so even though they contain a lot of stuff, they aren't much bigger than the sum of the sizes of the music and voice files alone.
You can create a Dance Module from the Dance Details screen - click the "Export This Dance" button 
near the bottom center of the screen. A window containing a big green "Make a Dance 
Module" button will pop up. If you click that button, you will be asked where you want to save your new dance module. Suggested places include the DanceMaster\Dance Modules folder, to another disk on your computer, to a USB memory stick, to another computer on your network, or wherever else you might need to put it. The suggested module name (the name of the dance) will be already filled in, but you can change it if you need to. Just don't change the ".DM2" part.
When you click "Open", DanceMaster will proceed to create the dance module, and will keep you posted on its progress. When it is done, you could click the green button again to make another copy if you really wanted to, but you'll most likely click the pink "Exit" button to close the window.
What else are Dance Modules good for?
| • | You can backup your dances as dance modules. So instead of backing up a collection of cue cards, a collection of music files, a folder of voice files, etc., you can have a collection of dances. And this way you will be backing up the dance data at the same time. |
| • | When you are going to cue at a festival, you can email the dances you plan to cue to whoever is programming the affair. S/he can then put your dances, along with those of other cuers, on one laptop (running DanceMaster, of course), and you won’t have to swap laptops in and out as you step up to cue your tip. The community laptop will already have YOUR dances with YOUR cues and YOUR timing, bookmarks, and voice/music balance all set up. |
| • | Or you can carry just your dances, not your whole computer, to the festival on a USB flash drive and load them into the host’s laptop when you get there. Now THAT'S traveling light! |