I’ve been trying different "BPM" apps off and on for quite while with little to no results. Either they’ve crashed, or they’re marginally associated with iTunes and expect you to use their interface. Enter Tangerine, by Potion Factory. This slick little app will scan your iTunes library, determine BPM for everything it can, and let you create iTunes playlists based on BPM and beat intensity.

The main window is easy to navigate. Clicking on the spinning tangerine in the lower right corner shows the status of the BPM/intensity determination.

Yes, it says there’s an hour and 33 minutes left. It’s not as bad as its sounds. Given that I had 9600+ tracks to analyze and that my music is on a network attached hard drive, and hour and a half is pretty darn good.

Once the analysis is complete, the fun begins. Tangerine lets you specify a beat range and an intensity range for a playlist. It also lets you decide how to organize the songs, length of playlist, etc. Here’s one I created for my higher BPM songs:

I’m not entirely sure, but I think the width of the image has to do with the intensity of the beat. The height of the image is proportional to the track’s BPM.

If you’re paying attention, you should have noticed some issues with the above playlist. Sure - Queen, Orbital, and Marilyn Manson make sense for having high BPM tracks, but Roger Miller? And not just any Roger Miller song, but "My Uncle Used To Love Me But She Died"? (Which you can tell with nifty tooltip-type popups.)

Tangerine is in beta, so I’m not too surprised that some songs seem to have their BPM calculated a bit "off". Fortunately, the app will let you pick a track and either halve or double its BPM, so the problem entries can be weeded out. I have over 9600 tracks in my library, so I haven’t done too much of that legwork yet - I’m hoping that a subsequent release will be a bit more accurate.

I’ve already used Tangerine to make a couple of high speed playlists for my workouts, and its integration with iTunes works like a charm. You can tweak a playlist all you want in Tangerine, but it doesn’t exist in iTunes until you specifically tell it to. Likewise, the discovered BPM info is only stored in Tangerine until you tell it to store that data to iTunes. It’s a great way to mess around without worrying that you’ll mess up your iTunes library.

technorati tags:mac, itunes, music, playlist

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