beats per minute

[egypturnash]

Tangerine! is a pretty clever little app. Works out the BPM of all your tracks, and can generate playlists with a few different profiles of song-to-song BPMs.

I would play with it more, but there's a fly in the ointment for me: a lot of my music collection was encoded with Audion, as variable bit-rate MP3 files. iTunes gives me highly bogus track lengths on a lot of these as a result. This has been annoying me ever since I switched to iTunes. I was slowly going back and re-ripping to AAC, which iTunes knows how to get proper track length from, but this isn't going to happen now that all my CDs are gone.

Playing with Tangerine made me poke at this problem again, and I finally found a tool that might be able to fix this - but I really don't feel like installing the unixy QT gui just for one task, nor do I feel like installing Fink to install a Subversion client just to be able to get the source and compile the command-line version to play with.

Oh, wait, here's a package of Subversion that I don't have to install something ELSE to install...

(yes, I'll install a version control system to compile a command-line version of a tool rather than install a widget toolkit. I do not pretend to understand myself in this.)

Unfortunately I couldn't get it to compile. And the QT framework installer packaged with the binary version seems to be broken, too - the app still didn't run. Oh well. Someday I will fix this. Someday. Even if I do this by scrounging images of all 600 or so CDs I used to have and re-ripping them, or getting new rips off of friends with similar tastes in music and encoding quality.

Comments

Last I checked...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...iTunes supports ID3v2 tags.

Those tags include song-length IIRC, have you tried an ID3v2 tag-rebuilder on all the songs to set the song-length correctly?

Re: Last I checked...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Yeah... the ID3v2 TLEN tag is the audio-length tag, if that's set correctly all the problems should go away.

Re: Last I checked...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Turns out that these files lack a TLEN, but do have a 'playtime_seconds' and 'playtime_string' tag, both of which have sensible data. Well then. Yay for old and highly-variable specs. Now to see what I can do about that.

Re: Last I checked...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

hmm. unfortunately a combination of itunes applescript + a quick front-end in PHP to get playtime_seconds is not going to work, as the track length is a read-only property to the Applescript implementation.

Re: Last I checked...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

D'oh!

Would id3v2 (http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/) help any? Yes, that's the name of the program, the programmer was (as many are) clueless about Google searches for their tool apparently. =^.^=

Re: Last I checked...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I tried one once, ages ago, but I remember it rendering the test file unreadable. I figured that Audion had tagged the files it encoded as having the proper length, and iTunes failed to comprehend this, as Audion always gave me the proper lengths.

It is quite possible that I'm poking at things through an excessively technical lens.

On the other hand, it's also possible that these are subtly-malformed files: poking at a handful of these tunes with the getID3 library's demos threw out some warnings. But it also gave me track times that sounded about right, instead of 30m-1h ranges.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I have to wonder if that isn't (wasn't) a bug with Audion. Nearly all of my library is encoded using LAME's VBR encoder, and I haven't noticed any bogus track length issues. iTunes certainly doesn't require AAC. (You can rip to VBR MP3 with iTunes itself; I've just gathered LAME's encoder is a bit better, and I have a script that lets iTunes call it directly, so it's fairly painless.)

...not that this observation helps you even if it's true, but, well.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It might well be. It could also be that the spec was still in flux when they wrote their importer - it was a while back, and these files do include a couple of tags with the time. Just not what iTunes wants.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

id3 tag abuse Automator action, with source - pointer for when I feel geeky enough to use that as a base for a 'Fix Audion's Broken Tune Length Tags' action?

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Good on you avoiding the Qt framework. Misfit Modeller 3D uses it and it looks terrible. Argh, using control for shortcut keys. Who does that? Seriously.

right on!

[(Anonymous)]

Tangerine is pretty cool, i'm still waiting for all the BPM's to be figured but some intersting new playlists could be creater from that info, i just hope it stays free, either that or there's always next months Serial.box. for us pirates. Mac Developpers like to make you pay, or like to make you find a serial, either way i don't make enough to have a credit card and i don't trust paypal, so there.
----
http://www.polseguera.com (http://www.polseguera.com/polres/index.php)

Re: right on!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Like everyone with an arcane skill, developers like to get paid to do what they're good at.

Re: right on!

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

What's with the random spamming?