Paul Tow

In my iTunes library and on my iPod, I have two thirty-minute playlists. One is called “Energize” and contains songs ordered by increasing speed. The other, “Rest,” is ordered by decreasing speed and helps me fall asleep. These playlist are automatically created by my computer and are constantly changing. My computer does this using the BPM (beats per minute) field in the iTunes metadata. Normally, this requires manually determining and entering that information by hand for each song, but there’s a much, much easier and less time consuming way.

Tangerine! from the Potion Factory is a $24.95 shareware application that quickly analyzes your each song in your iTunes library and automatically calculates the BPM and beat intensity. Within its very well done, very Mac-like interface, it lets you create iTunes playlists following a desired pattern. For example, you can make a workout playlist which becomes faster and more intense, reaches a climax, and then slows for your cool down. You can also control the playlist’s length, BPM range, and/or beat intensity range. Perhaps most importantly, BPM data can be exported to iTunes so that you can make smart playlists such as the two I described earlier.

A competing application which may be worth looking into is beaTunes, which is $31.95 shareware that runs on both Windows and OS X. Personally, I prefer Tangerine for its interface.