Beats Per Minute

One of my newer electronic gadgets is an iPod Shuffle, and my primary (almost sole) use for it is to set my walking/jogging pace on those occasions I choose to walk or jog. Tunes with a tempo of 120 to 135 or so beats per minute are good walking tunes, while jogging requires something in the 150 to 160 range. I have a play list of about 100 tunes which I have gleaned from my small music library mostly by trial and error, and by using the play count feature in iTunes. But I thought it would be really cool if I could just sort my library by tempo and cut out the trial and error.

In fact, iTunes has a BPM field, but I noticed my only album which had it populated was The Beatles 1. You can add this information to any entry in the library, but I was not anxious to sit and count beats while looking at the second hand on my watch for however long it takes to go through all the tunes of interest.

A search for “itunes bpm” yielded a pointer to an article which in turn led to a free download called MixMeister BPM Analyzer, so I installed it (by the way, Chuck was appalled that I just casually downloaded a program without checking the site that supposedly knows which other sites are safe, and I’m not disagreeing with him, but I did it anyway). This app is pretty cool, in my opinion. You just point it to a folder containing your music files, including subfolders, and it analyzes each tune and reports the tempo in bpm. It will even update the iTunes bpm field for you.

The problem I had was that when I pointed it to my iTunes music (once I figured out where it was) it couldn’t find anything. It turns out that the app recognizes certain file types, including MP3 and WAV, but not whatever the iTunes preferred format is, so I was pretty bummed out at this point.

Chuck to the rescue! He told me I could set a preference in iTunes so it would maintain my library as MP3’s. After changing that setting, I imported several more CD’s, ran the BPM Analyzer, and created a playlist for everything from 120 to 160. Final verdict isn’t in yet, but preliminary indications point to a success!

I still have the issue of what to do about all the stuff I already have in iTunes. I haven’t really looked to see if I can convert them to MP3’s, thought that is an obvious thing to check. Deleting and reimporting them is another option, but I probably won’t do that, just because. I also don’t know if there is a storage size penalty by using MP3 instead of the other format. Watch this space; I may actually attempt to answer some of these questions.