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Yup, they sent me a faceplate for my Wii guitar, along with a note explaining that the gift is a thanks for being patient and waiting to get my remastered GH3 disc.

While this probably isn’t the design I would have picked on my own, I have yet to find faceplates for the Wii guitars in stores yet, so beggars can’t be choosers.

This gesture is nice and aimed at keeping customers. I appreciate the gift, but I’d rather have an apology for the way they screwed up and shared a bunch of email addresses that should have been kept private. I guess customers have been more concerned about how many speakers their game’s music comes out of than who has their email address.

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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