Winamp and Pacemaker

Winamp and Pacemaker

One of the big improvements in the Player for version 3 is the fact that we can now change the speed of the dance - smoothly - as the music is playing!  You can now make adjustments on the fly without worrying that you will drop a bar or two of music. And, we now have tone controls for each dance, and for each venue.

DanceMaster depends on an external program - Winamp - to handle actually playing the music.  DMP tells Winamp what to play, when and where to start and stop it, and how fast to play it, as well as what tone settings to use, but Winamp does the actual playing.  Winamp, in turn, depends on another program called Pacemaker to perform the magic of changing the playback speed without changing the pitch.

Winamp is free, but Pacemaker is not - it'll cost you almost $10.  I figured you'd feel that being able to change the speed of the music smoothly, without changing the pitch, would be well worth that.

Here's how to register Pacemaker.

At this point you should create your cue card and sound files. (See Creating Sound Files and Preparing Cue Cards, above if you haven't already) Then you can tell DanceMaster which ones go with each dance as you enter the information about the dance itself.

And then…

Now that you have some music files in your music files folder, some voice files in your voice files folder, and some cue cards in your cue card folder, the next step is to get the information about the dances into the database. The way to do that depends on whether you are using the DanceMaster Record Librarian to keep track of your records or not.

If you are, then this is the time to go to the Librarian program to enter the record and dance information. (See the DanceMaster Record Librarian help file)

If not, then you can use the Player’s Mini-Database Entry Screen to load just the dance information.

Next: Using DanceMaster Player