Friday, February 8th, 2008

How to add bpm information to your tracks

Adding bpm (beats per minute) info can be beneficial to a variety of users.  Perhaps you’re an aspiring DJ, or like to jog with your ipod, or maybe you just like dancing to all the fastest songs in your music collection.  No matter what your reason is, it’s relatively easy to add bpm tags to your files.  The best program I’ve found is called MixMeister BPM Analyzer. The program allows you to pick mp3 files, and will automatically determine a bpm value.  The bpm value is stored in the id3 tag of the file, and will show up in your favourite media player (as long as it isn’t boring old Windows Media Player).

The Bad News:  I originally had visions of amazing playlists where I’d have all my fast rock tracks, and all my slow tracks separated for various moods, but as it turns out, bpm can only take you so far.  In my experience, the bpm value really only allows you to match songs up without a change in pace.  The value itself does not tell you too much about the actual feel of the track.  Just because the speed is 120bpm doesn’t necessarily make it a rock track.  For example, over half of Jay-Z’s “Black Album” has an average bpm of around 90 (with about 2 tracks at 165 bpm) while Belle & Sebastian’s “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” has an average bpm of around 135.  I wouldn’t consider Belle & Sebastian more intense than Jay-Z, even though their songs have a faster tempo.

 The Good News:  The bpm value can provide some good insight when comparing tracks by the same artist.  Since an artist is generally consistent within it’s own genre, the tempo of a track can really help show where the “slow songs” are on an album.  The only difficulty with this is that I have yet to find a valid algorithm within iTunes’ smart playlists to properly compare bpm values between songs on the same album.

It’d be interesting to explore some more applicable uses for the bpm value of a track for an everyday iTunes user.