More fun with iTunes

[dreamshark]

I 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.

Comments

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I imported the music to the MyMusic/iTunes/ folder using the Windows Media Player, but it doesn't show up afterward.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Try this.

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.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Thanks! The drag-and-drop bit seems to have done the trick!