beaTunes News

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

beaTunes 4.0.23 - New Mood Plugin

beaTunes4 logo

Now, that the BeatGauge smoke has settled a bit, it's time for an overdue beaTunes update. Frankly, I would have posted this a while ago, but Apple recently messed up something in their codesign tool, that prevented me from properly signing the OS X version. It's not that they have actually fixed this yet, but I'm glad I've found a workaround (the link unfortunately requires an Apple dev account).

For those of you who are importing mood data via Last.fm tags, this release offers an alternative. The AcousticBrainz project offers some calculated mood data, which can now be accessed via a beaTunes plugin (Preferences -> Plugins) as long as your songs are associated with MusicBrainz IDs (MBIDs). After installation, the plugin shows up as an additional analysis option. If you decide to install and use the plugin (sources here), please consider contributing to the project. They're doing cool stuff and deserve your support!

Anyhow. As always, you can download the update for beaTunes from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.0.23

  • Fixed issue in bpm rule.
  • Fixed bad drop location indicator in playlist tree.
  • Fixed tooltips in inspection preferences.
  • Fixed new playlist from selection for very large selections.
  • Removed caching of Last.fm error messages.
  • Improved lyrics import.
  • Improved embed artwork inspector logic.
  • Added AcousticBrainz.org service class.
  • Moved to Jipes 0.9.10.
  • Moved to Java 8u45.

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posted at 10:45 0 comments

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Free BeatGauge Licenses

BeatGauge Logo

I'm giving away 10 free BeatGauge licenses to beaTunes 4 users. If you're interested, please simply leave a comment on http://blog.beatunes.com/2015/05/free-beatgauge-licenses.html. The first 10 comments, that are verifiable from people who have purchased beaTunes 4 for OS X, qualify.

Please note, that BeatGauge requires OS X 10.10 (Yosemite).

To give you an idea what BeatGauge looks like in action, here's a little demo video (this is not speeded up in any way):

I'm also quite happy to report, that a British customer had the following to say about version 1.0.0 (current version is 1.0.1):

Astonishingly good, accurate and easy to use ★★★★★
by Nick65423 - Version - 1.0.0 - May 13, 2015

This just works. I used to use an old piece of software (ltjBPM) to determine BPM. This involved listening to each track and tapping the space bar in time with the music. Each track took about a minute to do. My 4571 tracks would have taken seven and a half hours to finish, but I would have given up long before that. BeatGauge did all 4571, with no interference or supervision from me, in roughly seven and a half minutes and never made a mistake. For interest, I tried to trick it to see what, if any, error messages came back, or if it would crash. I fed it one-second orchestra stings (Message: Unable to determine BPM). I fed it voice memos (Message: Unable to determine BPM). I fed it DRM-protected tracks (Message: Illegal operation. DRM protected?). Finally, I moved the parent file of a track to break its link with its listing in iTunes. (Message: File does not exist). None of these tricks would be done by anyone in day-to-day use, but it is interesting to see that the software coped with everything I tried and came back with an accurate result. The best software is simple, accurate and works with as little user supervision as possible. BeatGauge is one of those apps. Brilliant.

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posted at 05:50 35 comments

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

BeatGauge: Automatic BPM detection for iTunes

BeatGauge Logo

I'm happy to announce, that beaTunes got a little brother today. His name is BeatGauge and he's a dead-simple, automatic BPM calculator. While beaTunes aims at the larger goal of improving metadata to build great playlists, BeatGauge does only one thing, but it does it very well:

It computes BPM values for your iTunes songs.

Simply drag your tracks from iTunes onto the app and it will automatically start calculating, reporting the results back to iTunes immediately. Honestly, I don't know how this could be done any simpler.
Under the hood, BeatGauge uses multithreaded GCD code, taking advantage of your computer's multiple cores. It's written in Swift for OS X 10.10 (Yosemite)—in other words: Apple's latest technologies.

As of today, BeatGauge is exclusively available via the Mac App Store (MAS). If you're using iTunes on Yosemite and are looking for a light-weight BPM calculator, BeatGauge is definitely a nice addition to your audio tool-belt. Give it a try!

Demo

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posted at 03:31 6 comments