beaTunes News

Friday, November 21, 2014

Open Chordify from beaTunes

Wouldn't it be nice to automatically extract chords from any song? Or have some application display chords as subtitles for YouTube music videos? Perhaps loop a certain section, so you can practice playing it on the guitar?

Well you're in luck, the website of the Dutch startup Chordify.net does just that.

I met Bas de Haas, the guy responsible for the chord recognition part, a couple of years ago in Utrecht (NL), where he received his PhD for work on music information retrieval. Obviously his work was fruitful. But not only the raw transcription part works really well on Chordify. The user experience is thought through exceptionally well. Being able to simply watch the YouTube video in sync with a marker on a music sheet is just fantastic. Plus: It's pretty. Often times you see original cover art of emerging artists as background wallpaper. That's no accident. If you happen to play in a band and are looking to promote it... contact them, they might just put your cover on the site for free. "No strings attached."

How does this relate to beaTunes? Starting with version 4.0.13, you can right-click on any song, choose Open in... > Chordify and open the corresponding Chordify page (if the song is also on YouTube, Deezer or Soundcloud). It really couldn't be any easier to find those chords.

I hope you enjoy this neat little feature, which opens up a great website for you. As you will see right away—Chordify is built with a lot of care and attention to detail. Creating this connection has been a pleasure for me. I'm sure using it will be fun for you as well.

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posted at 12:03 0 comments

Chords, #NowPlaying, Prefix-Search and more!

beaTunes4 logo

beaTunes 4.0.13 is out and it's not just fixes. Even though it's only a point release, it offers a couple of new things I hope you're going to like. The feature included in this release, that was demanded most, is most certainly prefix search. That's the kind of search, where typing the first couple of letters of a word already leads to matches, with no need to type the entire word.

Another new feature is the Share button. Located to the right of the volume knob, it allows you to tweet what you are listening to, conveniently marked with the #NowPlaying hash tag. On OS X 10.8 or later, beaTunes uses the system integration, on 10.7 and Windows it simply opens a browser window. In either case you can edit what you post, before it's published.

Last but not least, beaTunes 4.0.13 features a new Open in... context menu: Chordify, which lets find out the chords of any song in your collection that's also on YouTube, Deezer or Soundcloud. Just right-click on a song, choose Open in... > Chordify and watch the chords appear in your browser. If you like to play guitar, Chordify is a website you must know. I'll write more about it in another post.

There are a couple of other things fixed and new, which I don't want to go into in great detail. Please simply refer to the list below.

You can download the software from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.0.13

  • Fixed translate button in Get Info lyrics pane.
  • Fixed issues with Apple Lossless on Windows.
  • Added Twitter share button.
  • Added prefix filter/search.
  • Added new read-only file inspector.
  • Added compilation column.
  • Added open in Chordify
  • Improved file system based sync speed.
  • Improved multi item Get Info panel.
  • Updated to Groovy 2.3.7.
  • Updated to JRuby 1.7.16.1.
  • Split visible column popup into sub-menus.
  • Allow importing of zero Last.fm tags.

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posted at 11:34 0 comments