BPM Update

So far the news regarding the MixMeister BPM Analyzer is all good. iTunes allows me to create an MP3 version of anything in my library, and I can choose a whole bunch of tunes and do them all at once. The bad thing is that it keeps both versions, but until I run low on disk space that’s not really that bad.

Since I had populated the BPM field on a goodly portion of tunes, I just sorted my library by BPM and selected the ones that were blank. The process takes about as long as it does to import something from a CD, so you start it up and walk away.

Side note – I could not have done this before I found a workaround for the overheating problem (see previous topic Hot Computer); things would just get slower and slower until I would give up and stop the process.

The other piece of good news is that the BPM Analyzer does not recalculate if the field is already populated. So, after creating MP3 versions for all the tunes of interest, I ran the Analyzer and just pointed it at the iTunes Music folder. It lists all the tunes it finds, along with the beats per minute if it exists, then plows through all the others to generate the BPM field. This is another time to start the app and walk away, but it worked like a champ.

When that’s done, you go back to iTunes and do a Get Info for all the tunes with blank BPM (again, you can select the block and do them all at once; very quick). Then it’s a simple matter of sorting and selecting to a playlist.

For me, with a library of about 400 tunes (pause for snickering to subside), I selected a walking/jogging playlist of 160+ about one fifth are jogging tempo and the rest walking. In practice, since I do a .75 mile loop, I get about 1 jogging tune per lap on the average, which is just about right. I’ve done 4 laps, 3 miles, each of the past 2 days with a sustained heart rate over 100 and peaks in the 140s while jogging.

So far, so good. Stay tuned.