GeekFindr: Tangerine for iTunes
My new section, GeekFindr, tagline “I had an itch and found something to scratch it” … hm.. but less gross than that sounded. Reviews or just pointers to follow.
So my first find. I’ve long railed against iTunes’ inability to calculate beats per minute (BPM) for my library - I mean, why can’t it just know that? This would help with so many things, making quick and easy smart lists for uptempo playlists or sleepy time playlists - instead of having to go through and pick groups or songs ad hoc and hand craft everything. Doing that is fine and fun, but with a large library, sometimes it’s nice to just set things to shuffle and go - until now that wasn’t possible.
Enter, Potion Factory’s Tangerine, and by enter I don’t mean recently, it’s mildly old but I only recently got around to grabbing it. Sue me. This little app grabs your itunes library and very handily calculates two things for each song - BPM and beat intensity, which measures the strength of the beat (as opposed to the frequency). It does this very quickly, on my li’l iMac it took only 8 or 9 minutes to do my 2000+ songs. While I haven’t gone through and verified it’s accuracy or anything, it seems pretty good about things. In the demo version it will not export these numbers to iTunes, you need to rely on it’s own playlist generation (more on this below) which it will export to iTunes. The full version will send the BPM’s over, so smartlists will be able to work with them.
If that was all it did, it would certainly be enough! But it does more, it has a playlist generation tool. It can create flat playlists (not smart) out of various parameters that you set. The parameters are all the normal ones you’d see in iTunes plus these two great sliders to determine BPM and beat intensity range. As you move the sliders around it tells you how many songs fit those parameters. The strange part is that you can pick a “generation pattern” - this can be random or it can be a hill, two hills, interval, etc.. If you’ve ever been on an exercise bike, it will look familiar. This determines how the BPM build up happens, so if you want your songs to build up to a big crescendo in the middle of the list and then taper off, you can have it do that. I guess a lot of the goal of Tangerine was to help people build workout lists and while I don’t listen to music when I workout, I can see why this would be really cool.
For all these generated lists you have to pick a duration. This all ties back in to the whole exercise thing, but I wish there had been an option to just have it pull all the songs that meet the criteria and make that a list. The other thing I don’t love about it is that when you use it to generate a list it gives you a nice flow of covers in the panel to show you your list. While this is pretty and nice, what I’d really prefer is for it to show me a listing of the songs it’s going to pull - in order to get that list, you need to save it as an itunes list.
Those are probably the only two niggling problems I have with this app. If you love itunes and are addicted to shuffling through your whole library, definitely check this app out. It’s good stuff. People love it.
