More fun with iTunes
Nov. 15th, 2010 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkI decided I wanted to fill in the BPM field in my music library for a couple of reasons. I had long thought it would be helpful for setting up exercise playlists. But the thing that finally pushed me to do it was taking a refresher CPR class and being told for the umpteenth time that the easiest way to get the rhythm of 100 bpm was to hum "Stayin' Alive," a song that apparently everyone in the world but me is intimately familiar with. So I decided to go through my song collection and find one with the correct tempo that I actually knew.
Turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. There are tons of downloadable utilities that will calculate BPM for you automatically but NONE of them work with iTunes formatted songs. Mostly they require songs to be in mp3 format. So I spent much of the weekend figuring out how to use iTunes to convert the existing ones. It's kind of time-consuming, so I started a second iTunes Library and have been gradually populating it with mp3-formatted songs, one artist at a time.
Once a got a few hundred potential workout songs in the new library, I downloaded MixMeister, a highly recommended free utility for automatic bpm calculation and started applying it. OMG, what weird results! The slowest song in my library is... "These Boots are Made for Walking"??? But "Cruel War," a song that could easily be used as a lullaby, comes in at a rousing 131 bpm! Maybe I'd better find out what Beats Per Minute actually MEANS.
Ohhh, I see. There's a lot of stuff in the Wikipedia entry about crotchets and minims and complex time signatures, but ultimately it turns out that in modern usage they just count drum beats. This is relatively easy if you're classifying the kind of music that has a steady boom-shicka, boom-shicka, boom-shicka rhythm, but it falls apart completely when you've got 3 voices warbling along to a Travers pick on a guitar. But what about "Boots," a song with the kind of driving rhythm that could march you right up the side of a skyscraper if you tried to walk to it? I think the problem is that the first beat in each measure is so exaggerated in that song that the second beat just got ignored.
So I found another utility to correct the mistakes of the automatic tool - a simple little online thing that lets you find the beat yourself by tapping a key along with the music. Ah. Now "Boots" is at the top of the tempo list (160bpm) instead of the bottom with 80. And "Cruel War" drops down to a much more reasonable 99 bpm (which still seems kind of fast for such a soporific song, but more plausible).
This is fun.
Turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. There are tons of downloadable utilities that will calculate BPM for you automatically but NONE of them work with iTunes formatted songs. Mostly they require songs to be in mp3 format. So I spent much of the weekend figuring out how to use iTunes to convert the existing ones. It's kind of time-consuming, so I started a second iTunes Library and have been gradually populating it with mp3-formatted songs, one artist at a time.
Once a got a few hundred potential workout songs in the new library, I downloaded MixMeister, a highly recommended free utility for automatic bpm calculation and started applying it. OMG, what weird results! The slowest song in my library is... "These Boots are Made for Walking"??? But "Cruel War," a song that could easily be used as a lullaby, comes in at a rousing 131 bpm! Maybe I'd better find out what Beats Per Minute actually MEANS.
Ohhh, I see. There's a lot of stuff in the Wikipedia entry about crotchets and minims and complex time signatures, but ultimately it turns out that in modern usage they just count drum beats. This is relatively easy if you're classifying the kind of music that has a steady boom-shicka, boom-shicka, boom-shicka rhythm, but it falls apart completely when you've got 3 voices warbling along to a Travers pick on a guitar. But what about "Boots," a song with the kind of driving rhythm that could march you right up the side of a skyscraper if you tried to walk to it? I think the problem is that the first beat in each measure is so exaggerated in that song that the second beat just got ignored.
So I found another utility to correct the mistakes of the automatic tool - a simple little online thing that lets you find the beat yourself by tapping a key along with the music. Ah. Now "Boots" is at the top of the tempo list (160bpm) instead of the bottom with 80. And "Cruel War" drops down to a much more reasonable 99 bpm (which still seems kind of fast for such a soporific song, but more plausible).
This is fun.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-16 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-17 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-17 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-17 11:32 pm (UTC)First, take the folder of music out of your iTunes directory and put it somewhere else, like on your desktop. This is just to avoid accidentally ending up with two copies of everything, which might happen if you tell iTunes to import FROM and TO the same location.
1) Open iTunes.
2) Select Import Folder (or something like that) from File Menu
3) Navigate to the top of the folder tree holding all your music and select it.
If that doesn't do it, just drag the entire folder of music from Windows Explorer right onto the iTunes window and let go of it.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-17 12:16 am (UTC)On the other: I don't really care about BPM. I can see why you would, but I just semi-randomly pick upbeat songs to exercise/drive to and don't worry too much about stepping to the beat.
Still, I looked around and came up with beaTunes, which has a trial version, for Windows and Mac. Claims that you don't have to tap, and has other features. Haven't used it; if you do, let me know the results.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-17 06:22 pm (UTC)I'm still a little baffled by exactly what BPM means. It is not the same thing as tempo, although they obviously overlap. In some songs there are clearly two beats per measure that need to be counted (as in "These Boots Are Made for Walking.") But in other songs you really only pay attention to the first beat in the measure.
Maybe it's the difference between a song that is in 2/4 time as opposed to one in 4/4. Maybe it just has to do with the way the drummer plays the song. Or maybe it's all in the individual reaction to the song.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-17 07:25 pm (UTC)A longer list of software, updated in September (it claims) is here.
While I can see the utility for dance and exercise, I can mostly ignore BPM. So far, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-17 08:31 pm (UTC)But what is a "beat?"
Music is divided into measures, and the time signature describes how many "logical" beats there are in each measure. Tempo describes roughly how fast each measure of music should be performed. But you can't arrive at BPM by multiplying beats/measure X tempo because the former is a number but the latter is a sensation (generally expressed in Italian).
BPM as calculated for modern use by DJs clearly is not counting all the "beats" as described by the time signature. If it were, the numbers would be much larger than they are. I think they are simply counting drum beats. Sometimes just the louder drumbeats if you've got a complicated or very rapid percussive background (think of Paul Simon's "Rhythm of the Saints").
Wikipedia says (among other things): "Higher BPM values are therefore achievable by increasing the number of drum beats, without increasing the tempo of the music."
Of course, earlier in this same entry, tempo was equated to BPM which was equated to time signature, which flatly contradicts that statement. So perhaps Wikipedia is not the best source for this discussion. It does say right at the top, "THIS ARTICLE HAS ISSUES."