Jivin’ to the beat - Tangerine

Tangerine is a new Mac program from the Potion Factory that will analyze the music in your iTunes library for BPM (beats per minute) and beat intensity. It also has a gorgeous, intuitive interface.

This is great because most music files don’t come with this information, but once you have it, there is all sorts of cool stuff you can do with it

A few things I’ve been playing with is finding the best BPM combo for computer work and for run workouts. You could also use it to find just the right dance music, or the perfect soundtrack with the right flow for your viral video or student film. Once you get going, this is a huge asset in music selection. It also syncs iTunes so you have access to the data there to sort with or to create Smart Playlists which Tangerine does not seem to support.

Another thing it encourages is serendipity. I have 30GB of music in my library, statistically, I rarely listen to most of it, but when I make playlists from beat levels, I hear music I haven’t heard in a while, often juxtaposed perfectly with another song from a completely different genre, something that I would never have thought to put together before.

Here is a sample from my “Working Mix” demonstrating the variety of music that can share the similar characteristics. By matching BPM and intensity, you get a seamless vibe and flow with a variety of music.

Tangerine’s controls allow for you to do alot very easily, and has a cool interface for displaying artwork, and relative BPM.

While I recommend it for current use, there are a few things I’d like to see before it comes out of beta:

• Better Error Messages/Handling: I originally had some problems getting it to load my iTunes library. It loaded it, processed 5000 songs in about 3 minutes and errored on every single one of them. I told it to reanalyze, and after 8 hours on my 2-year-old Powerbook, it had analyzed my whole library with only a few errors. Making this more intuitive or having more informative error messages or logging besides “Error.” would be helpful.
• An “Analyze songs without BPM/Intensity Data” option: Currently if you add more music or have errors, the only option is to reanalyze the whole library. If there is a way to do this already, please let me know.

{Tools, Technology}

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