Bohemians Per Meter
Posted on | September 9, 2007 at 4:35 pm | 2 Comments
In my previous entry, I alluded to the fact that there’s something else I’m doing to the MP3 files I’ve ripped from my CD Collection, as well as the ones I’ve downloaded from eMusic. I’m running MixMeister’s BPM Analyzer on the entire collection. This analyzes the track and sets the “BPM” (Beats Per Minute) field in the MP3 tag. That field is usually empty, as no one usually much cares how fast the song is.
Well, I care about how fast a song is! You knows I likes my uptempo tunes! Especially when I’m jogging, I don’t want no slow song dragging me down and making me shuffle my feet instead of picking ‘em up and makin’ me pound that pavement. I figure that once I’ve got that field set for all songs, I can then do a Smart Playlist in iTunes for a jogging set of only uptempo songs. Or I can do one for a party playlist of tunes to get people moving. The possibilities are (not so) endless.
Of course, this means I have to trust the program to get that number right. From what I’ve seen, it does a pretty good job. However, there is the occasional slip-up. Something tells me that the “acoustic” version of “The Unguarded Moment” by The Church from El Momento Descuidado is not really 199 beats per minute. But I guess the way the acoustic drums pound away in that version fakes out the program. (BPM Analyzer tells me that the original version is 136 bpm, which matches my calculations.)
The drawback here is that takes several seconds per song to analyze it. And with the 20,000 tracks I have in iTunes, that’s a long time. At this point, I’ve been running it continuously since late yesterday morning, and it’s still not done. It’s close though – another hour or two. And luckily you can stop it and start it again, and it will take up from where it left off and not try to fill in the ones it’s already done, even if you import the entire iTunes library folder, like I’ve been doing.
Pet Peeve Of The Day: iTunes (7.4.1.2) does not recognize (in the song browser, at least) that an external program has modified that BPM field. Even if you shut iTunes down and start it up again. Even if you “undisplay” the BPM column and then display it again. Apparently The only way to get it to show up in the browser is to bring up the “Get Info” box on the song, or group of songs. It doesn’t even matter if you hit “okay” or “cancel” or “next” or “previous”, or if you don’t change anything. Just going into the Get Info dialog is enough to make it show the value in that field when you get out of the dialog and are back in the browser. What’s up with that? So when the analyzer program is done, I need to go into iTunes and do one massive “Get Info” on all songs at once.
Shout Out Of The Day: To the Denver Broncos, for pulling out a last second victory against the Buffalo Bills in the opening game of the season, via an extremely ready field goal kicking unit and the awesome, stressed Jason Elam who made up for his two missed FGs earlier in the game. That was quite an ending! I almost had a heart attack. And the game sure did look good on my new plasma HDTV!
Latre.
Comments
2 Responses to “Bohemians Per Meter”
September 9th, 2007 @ 4:55 pm
I think those BPM analyzers work by examining regularly recurring peaks (i.e., accents) – so it probably works well with songs that have strongly accented beats and less so with those that don’t, or with those whose accents are not on every beat. (Toss some classic reggae at it and see if it doesn’t think it’s twice as slow for counting only 1 and 3…) And it probably totally freaks out at yr superfast early-’90s US punk rock – the kind that’s ridiculously fast, with the drummer playing on a 2 and a 4 with a quarter-note beat so fast you can hardly tell it’s an offbeat and not just the downbeats of a half-speed version. (At that speed, I tend to think it’s ridiculous, really – not that you’re likely to use things that fast for your runs, or you’ll George Jetson onto your ass.)
Oh – and don’t feed it prog: god knows what it would do with three bars of 7/8 followed by two of 6/4 and two of 13/8…
September 9th, 2007 @ 4:57 pm
Oh – and don’t feed it prog: god knows what it would do with three bars of 7/8 followed by two of 6/4 and two of 13/8…
Yeah, I don’t want smoke coming out of my computer.