Phil Gyford

Writing

Thursday 1 May 2003

PreviousIndexNext Set beats-per-minute in iTunes

So I’m in deep with my Mac. I’ve turned my back on Mozilla and Camino and am loving Safari; I’m slowly turning to the bubblesome cuteness of iChat over Fire; I’m loving iTunes 4 and new improvedness; I’ve just gone wireless; my ageing PowerBook seems faster than ever; I’m drinking Steve’s Kool Aid in huge splashy gulps.

One of the many tiny unadvertised features in the new iTunes is the ability to set beats-per-minute (BPM) for each track in its info. At least, I think this is new. Could be handy, I thought, for automatically creating playlists of similar tempo songs. But how, Steve, how do I work out what a song’s BPM is? A quick search on VersionTracker and voila! The fabulous iTunes-BPM Inspector. Just tap along to the current song and it works out, and sets, the BPM for you. It’s insane, but wonderfully so.

Comments

Whoa!
Thanks SOOOO much for that! I've been wracking my brain with how to do it and was *blanches* using Excel to keep a file of the info when I had "guesstimated" it... It's kinda important when figuring out what to load to listen to at the gym...
Yay!

Thanks again!

Posted by Thom Pinho on 20 October 2004, 3:14 am | Link

that's good - BUT - I have over 7,000 tunes in my library and I would like a tool that can do the BPM counting for me and enter the BPM count for every song in the right filed in iTunes. It needs to work on Windows XP too because I'm not a Mac user.

Any chance of some guidance on this? It would be fantastic if you could help.

Many thanks

Posted by Milz on 28 July 2005, 3:24 pm | Link

A BPM counter that updates the iTunes record for WinXP is exactly what I'm looking for, too...

Posted by ep on 23 October 2005, 8:49 pm | Link

Go here for BPM detection software:
http://www.mmartins.com/mmartins/bpmdetection/bpmdetection.asp

Posted by epimp on 23 October 2005, 9:06 pm | Link

check
www.meanspeed.com
www.meanspeed.blogspot…

this will get you a start.

bets to you,
Ian Schneider
www.meanspeed.com

Posted by Ian Schneider on 20 July 2006, 3:13 pm | Link

Check out beaTunes at www.beatunes.com/
It automatically measures the BPM of your whole music collection.

Posted by Hendrik Schreiber on 3 August 2006, 8:22 pm | Link

#

Hendrik Schreiber at 3 Aug 2006, 8:22pm. Permalink

Check out beaTunes at www.beatunes.com/
It automatically measures the BPM of your whole music collection.
Checked it: pure garbage.
Why is all the BPM-ware shareware??? because IT CANNOT WORK--unless, maybe, it's a Justin Timberlake-esque "song" with nothing but repetitive industrial noises at a steady frequency.

Yup, BPM-ware is shareware because it is worthless.

Ian Schneider
www.meanspeed.com

Posted by Ian Schneider on 23 September 2006, 2:02 pm | Link

Does anyone know of a good bpm finder that can find the bpm of all of your itunes songs? It needs to work on Windows, not Mac.

Posted by erik on 6 April 2007, 9:47 pm | Link

I used this one:
www.tucows.com/preview…
It's been handy.

Posted by Jared on 29 October 2008, 9:28 pm | Link

I can attest that tangerine does this quickly and accurately. It's $25, but has a free 15-day trial with some export features neutered. Using the trial software, tangerine will tabulate all your tunes'.BPM and report that data within the tangerine interface. Then you can manually harvest the tangerine data to make bpm-based playlists, which isn;t that hard. I made 20 song playlists for all bpm from 105 to 170 bpm.

Later, I can harvest fro those lists to make custom lists. It has been a boon to my workouts so far.

Posted by kranky kritter on 2 February 2010, 7:24 pm | Link

Im sorry but Tangerine SUCKS ASS. It cant even detect a simple house beat and will label a 120BPM song as 60BPM, forcing you to go in and manually override its foolish mistakes. Pure garbage!

Posted by Willy Sanchez on 11 February 2010, 4:47 pm | Link

Finally! Easy download and then just click in the little window in rhythm to the song and the number turns blue and then click set. Done! Only thing is, you have to do it for each song; but I have a few playlists already set up near like what I want.
3000 songs to go! (it's better than nothing :)

Posted by Stacey on 25 September 2010, 2:34 am | Link

MixMeister BPM Analyzer is pretty good AND it's free! All you do is open program, drag songs you want to get BPMs for and let it analyze. Then when you play the song again in iTunes, the BPM shows up. Works for most file types.

Posted by Monette on 17 February 2011, 3:51 pm | Link

I downloaded the MixMeister BPM Analyzer but cannot get it to pull in my iTunes songs. It got my podcasts but not my songs. Any suggestions?

Posted by Laura on 29 June 2011, 2:13 pm | Link

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