I already watch almost every movie I buy on my iPhone, (thanks to Handbrake) so downloading movies is a logical nest step for me. And, in an effort to keep posts coming on a semi-regular basis, I thought I might as well start putting up some reviews of the movies I rent.

Movie reviews, coming soon. Because the Internet needs yet another uneducated moron reviewing things.

iTunes 7.6 also fixed a nasty bug that would cause Smart Playlists created with a "Video Kind" rule to fail – sometimes horribly.

Maybe I’m not looking in the right places. I love watching video on my iPhone. I also have a few season passes to TV shows through the iTunes Music Store. Some shows, like my new favorite Dexter, don’t release any episodes until the entire season is available. Here’s where the problem comes in. The first season of Dexter is 14 episodes, each around 660-670 megabytes in size. I have a 4 gig iPhone, so there’s no way all of the episodes will fit. Luckily, iTunes offers some flexibility in how video is synced to devices. I can select to sync all unwatched episodes of a show, or a subset of 1, 3, 5, or 10 unwatched episodes. For some reason, though, I can only pick the most recent unwatched episodes. WTF? Why the hell would I download an entire series, then choose to only sync the last 10 episodes? Why on earth didn’t Apple put in a similar set of options to let me sync the first 1, 3, 5, 10 episodes?

As it stands now, I have to watch enough episodes on my computer or my video iPod to be able to sync remaining episodes with the iPhone. I can create a smart playlist that keeps track of the oldest X number of unwatched episodes, but it doesn’t sync to the iPhone. iTunes sees the playlist as belonging to the Music category, and I can only choose to sync music videos, not TV shows within playlists.

C’mon Apple. I know this can’t be too hard. Make it easy for me to watch video on my iPhone like all the hype tells me I should do.

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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