BPM - (Head)bangs Per Minute

I love my new iPod. It's the most wonderful thing in the world, it's so much fun, I want to eat it.

Well, no, not really, I don't want to break my teeth, and it would put lots of dents into my beautiful baby.

Anyway I've been using it when I run, and really, it's not that great when you're running to a good song, and then it all of a sudden changes to another song that is a lot slower, or a lot faster.

My solution to this problem is: set the BPM for each song, so that I can then say, "get all of the songs within a certain BPM range," and I can then listen to songs that are approximately the same speed. Voila, more fun running.

By the way, if you haven't figured out yet, BPM stands for "beats per minute."

But how have I been figuring it out? It's very time consuming to calculate it for each and every one of my 1800+ songs in my library; but it's the only way to do it. I tried a few programs and this is what I've got:

But wait! Before I go into what programs I've been using, a quick question for anyone out there: Any suggestions for what bpm-rates to use when running/jogging? I'll have to do experiments, but if anyone has any experience that would be helpful.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming:

Beat Monitor



Beat Monitor is a program that will do it for me automatically. Well, almost automatically. It listens to the sound coming out of your line-out (where you plug your speakers in), and then tries to find the beats and count them. It works, but I don't really feel that I can depend on it. Who knows what kind of beats it's getting?

Another Approach

I've decided that the best way to do it is to re-define BPM as (head)bangs per minute. This means that each time I bang my head when I'm listening to the music is what really is a beat, rather than some musically-defined terminology for a metronome. So the best way to do it is, really, by hand - or rather, by spacebar.

Enter BPMCounter 2004



BPMCounter is a program that has you hit the spacebar to the beat, and then it calculates the beat based on your banal beating. It's working for me so far quite well, just beat to the song for about 30 seconds, and you get a decent count.

The only problem is that it's time consuming, and slightly inaccurate. That is to say, I might find that a song is 78 BPM, when it's really 76 or 80. But I think, as long as it's somewhat near accurate, it will do what I want.

Timewise, this will take me approximately 0.5 minutes x 1800 songs... 15 hours. Yay! But it's worth it, I think. Metadata is always worth it.