Getting Started

Things you should be aware of

To Old DanceMaster, the figures you added in "Plus" and "Signigicant Figures" were just a bunch of letters with no meaning. You could put anything you wanted in there and call it a figure. In order for DanceMaster II to find dances with particular figures in them, it has to be a lot fussier about that. It keeps a list of figures, along with things that each figure might be called on a cue card (cue terms). So it knows, for instance, that "l trn bx" really means "Left Turning Box", and that in a different dance, "lft trng box" means the same figure. Since everybody has their own preferred cue terms, you will have to tell DanceMaster II what "l turn bx" means to you.

It will be hard to try DanceMaster II without having some dances in it. You can, of course, enter some dances from scratch - the way you added dances to Old DanceMaster. Or you can export some of your dances as Dance Modules, and import them into DanceMaster II. But to see more of what makes DanceMaster II special, you should have enough dances to make some playlists and to search for dances by phase(s), rhythm(s), and by when they were last played at this venue.

For that, you will want to use the Database Converter to import your current dances - and dance history - into Dancemaster II. This won't disturb your Old DanceMaster setup - you can continue to use that without interruption. And you can choose to leave your music, voice, and cue files where they are, or to copy them to the new DanceMaster II folder. Either way will work.

The Database Converter (installed with DanceMaster II) will read your dances, venues, categories, dance logs, etc. and translate them into the form DanceMaster II needs. But since it doesn't know what cue terms you use for each figure, it will stop and ask each time it runs into a term it doesn't know. The good news is that once you have defined a term, the converter will remember it and not ask you again - unless you spell the term slightly differently. (alemana / alamana) The converter will save your definitions in a file, so if you perform the conversion again in the future, you shouldn't have to re-define your cue terms.

The conversion will take some time - perhaps a few hours if you have thousands of dances and lots of different spellings for your cue terms.

To download the program you will first have to register on this website (use the link near the top right). Registering will get you access to the program itself and to the Support Forum where you can ask questions and read answers to questions others have asked. The website will send you a confirmation email, and when you respond to that you can log in here. Then you will find a "Download" link at the top of the page.

After you have downloaded the installer, you can run it. It will create a new folder (C:\DanceMaster II) with the required sub-folders (Music Files, Cue Cards, etc) on your computer. You can copy your media files (the aforementioned music, cues, etc.) from your old DanceMaster folders - or not. DanceMaster II can use those files right where they are.