The Weekly Freebie: iTunes BPM Inspector

[MacBytes]

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Category: Tips and How To's
Link: The Weekly Freebie: iTunes BPM Inspector (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20050620145339)

Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)
Approved by Mudbug

[Fiveos22]

Count me in!

As a card holding ID3 tag junkie, I will be downloading this as soon as I get home. Too bad I have over 10000 tracks that will need to be tagged, but hell, that's what night is for.

[nagromme]

FYI, there's a neat Mac app called AsktheDJ than AUTOMATICALLY calculates the BPM of your iTunes library songs--and then alters the tempo as they play in order to beat-match them and make DJ-style transitions. Results varied when I tried it, but that was over a year ago and it was still fun--with a GUI that looked like a giant CD. It might be even better now. (And I think if you already HAVE BPM tags, it would use them too.)

[wrldwzrd89]

I can't use this because a significant portion of my songs change their BPM in the middle - some of them do it many times.

[mainstreetmark]

Plus, it's from the Quicksilver team. :)

[shamino]

What a great time saver. I've been tapping out the BPM for my music collection for months, as I fill in that tag. I was looking for a program to help speed up the process, and I think this will fill the bill very nicely.

[Fiveos22]

Hmm, this is a lot of work. And i don't quite feel like paying $29 for a program to do this for me (if thats what Askthedj does...the website is unclear on this point).

oh well

[mkrishnan]

FYI, there's a neat Mac app called AsktheDJ than AUTOMATICALLY calculates the BPM of your iTunes library songs--and then alters the tempo as they play in order to beat-match them and make DJ-style transitions. Results varied when I tried it, but that was over a year ago and it was still fun--with a GUI that looked like a giant CD. It might be even better now. (And I think if you already HAVE BPM tags, it would use them too.)

Has anyone used that software recently? I was really interested in it, but it seemed to make really bad mix choices when I loaded songs into it. The transitions were hugely awkward, even when all the songs were in the same genre. It had an especially hard time with songs that did not play well with big crossfades.

I didn't play with it that much, though, where I defined the mix and just used its beat-matching aspect. That might be worth it in itself. Actually, that (without the smart mix picker) and the ability to apply custom fades between each pair of songs in a mix, sort of like with video in iMovie or Premiere, would be enough to make me pay for a DJ app....

As for the program this thread is about.... Okay, so you have to play the song, and then manually adjust the beat counter to match the song? Does it at least do an FFT on the song and come up with an initial guess at the beat, that's usually accurate? Fourier transforms are not exactly rocket science...it seems kind of sad to have to do it totally manually, and a fairly simple algorithm should be accurate with a good chunk of music.

That's what Askthedj does, incidentally -- automatically tries to calculate the BPM of the song. That wasn't the issue -- it seemed to do that okay. What it had trouble with was songs that could not be faded into / out of...because it needed much longer cross-fades to get the beat matching just right, and the result was garbage for tracks that needed to start at full volume.

There's no way I am spending the time to go through even my most played list with an app like this...even though the result would be useful in making mixes later.

[puckhead193]

Well since their a BPM tagger thing, is their something that will fix my ID3 tags....