Lately, I’ve been going through my entire iTunes library and organizing things. I’ve got cover art for most of my music now, and lyrics to a large portion thanks to Harmonic. The larger task has been my goal to rate every track in my library; no small task with the 3,500+ songs I have to deal with.

The idea is that by having more and better metadata, I’ll be able to find music to suit my moods better. With the ratings, I can exclude songs I don’t care for very much, or pick ones I’ve rated highly.

One of the things I’ve been puzzling over has been that BPM field. It would be extremely handy to have the BPM there, since I could more easily find uptempo music for work or working out, and slower stuff for relaxing.

I’ve looked at a few different solutions so far.

• bpmWidget. Not bad, but you have to listen to every song and tap out the tempo. It will set the BPM in iTunes itself, but this approach is just too slow for anything more than a handful of songs.
• beaTunes. Not bad, but a bit too expensive at $20. I was also not thrilled that it kept it’s own database apart from iTunes, with additional information that wasn’t accessible from inside iTunes. And it’s interface is fairly functional, but nothing special.
• Tangerine. This seems like it’s the most promising, though it’s a beta, and doesn’t feel very functional just yet. It’s very nice looking, analyzes songs extremely fast, and, well, is a beta. It’s free for now; no word on pricing once the final version is out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.