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CallerBuddy For Playing Music

When you call, you need to play music. Now in theory you can use a standard audio playing program built into your computer/phone to do this, but a program that specializes in playing music for callers offers some advantages.

  1. It allows you to CHANGE THE TEMPO of music so that it is exactly 126 Beats per minute. As mentioned, even slight changes in tempo can have a significant effect on how fast dancers perceive the dance.
  2. It allows you to CHANGE THE PITCH of the music so that it fits in your vocal range optimally, which DEFINITELY makes songs easier to sing.
  3. It will display the lyrics of the music as it plays. As mentioned, ideally you have memorized your singing calls for your important performances, but inevitably at times you will be learning new songs, and it is helpful to have the lyrics handy while doing so.
  4. It has an auto-repeat feature for patter music (music never ends). Very handy as patter often goes longer than the typical 4-5 min length of patter music.
  5. It has a helpful timer for your patter (you should keep patter less than 10 min long, 5-8 min is probably ideal), as well as a 5 min timer for breaks between tips.
  6. It has the singing call progress monitor at the bottom so you can remind yourself which figure you are on in the singing call.
  7. All your songs are in one place, and you can easily separate your patter and singing calls (so you can find them quickly).
  8. It remembers all the changes to tempo, pitch, auto-repeat, lyric tweaks, and other preferences you set so that your music is always optimal.

There are a number of song players for square dance callers including SqView, but the one I want to suggest here is called CallerBuddy. If you type ‘CallerBuddy’ into a search engine you should find the following link:

CallerBuddy — Square Dance Caller Music & Lyrics

Here are some of the features that distinguish it from SqView and the others:

  • It is absolutely FREE, it even comes with a FREE demo patter and singing call.
  • Setup is trivial, if you click the link above you are running CallerBuddy in the browser.
  • Works on Windows, macOS, Chromebooks, Android phones (sorry no iPhone or iPad).
  • Works offline so you can play music without network access (even in the browser)
  • Music can be in the cloud, safe and available anywhere, but available offline.
  • Tracks what music you have used recently, so you don’t repeat yourself.
  • Adding songs is trivial (point it at the ZIP you bought, 90% of the work is done).

These features may not seem like a big deal to you, but you don’t realize the pain you are avoiding (especially when adding songs, and worrying about backup). I used to have a section on SqView in this document, and it was 25 pages long! It was not trivial to set up and load with songs. CallerBuddy removes most of this friction (along with letting you use both a laptop and a phone WITHOUT having multiple copies of your library of songs).

Try out the Free CallerBuddy Patter and Singing Call

Just click on the CallerBuddy link to get started. It will run CallerBuddy in the browser and lead you through creating a CallerBuddySongs folder (your library of songs). Note that you are NOT trusting CallerBuddy any more than any other web page on the internet, so it is ‘safe’ to just experiment with (it can ONLY access files in the new CallerBuddySongs folder you create for it).

During setup it will ask you if you want two demo songs. Say ‘yes’ and you can play with them and experiment with the user interface. The app has reasonably good help and hopefully the user interface is intuitive so you can learn most things simply by playing with it.

Eventually you will probably want to install CallerBuddy as an App so you can launch it from the TaskBar (you can find it easily). Note that this does NOT give CallerBuddy any more permissions than it had in the browser, it just makes it easier to find and launch. See the ‘Help Installing as App’ under the ☰ menu for exactly how to do this.

Buying and installing new Music into CallerBuddy

One of the BIG advantages of CallerBuddy over other music players is that it simplifies adding songs to your library of square dance music/lyrics. Generally the workflow for getting a song is to

  1. Use a site like music for callers to find songs you are interested in. These sites are ‘aggregators’ that don’t sell you music, they point you to sites that actually sell the music. For example you can enter ‘boogie shoes’ to find that music.
  2. You are sent to a particular web site that actually produces and sells music. You can browse what they have, listen to samples, add songs to your cart and purchase them.
  3. The result of (2) is one or more ZIP files (one for each song you bought). Now you have to load these into your song player.

Before CallerBuddy (3) was surprisingly difficult because there is no standardization on how music files and lyric files are named and distributed. This was aggravated by SqView’s overly complex mechanism of ‘Marrying’ a song and its lyrics. The result was quite a bit of frustration. In CallerBuddy this has been replaced by two simple steps

  1. Choose the ☰ -> Import Song from Zip menu item.
  2. Use the file chooser to point it to the Zip file with your purchased song. CallerBuddy will do its best to figure out what naming conventions were used and convert to the form that CallerBuddy uses. It displays its suggestion and asks you to confirm it.
  3. You look it over (typically it is perfect), modify anything you don’t like and commit.

This process takes less than 30 seconds, and you are ready to play. Check out the ☰ -> Help Adding Songs for more details on the process.