beaTunes News

Creating a playlist can be broken down in a two-step process: 1) selecting tracks, and 2) creating a compelling order. beaTunes supports selection through the matching song table below the main table. beaTunes 4 and earlier helped with ordering by letting the user apply a match ruleset, even on already existing list.

beaTunes 5 now offers an additional way of ordering: Order by property.

In it's simplest form this is like sorting by clicking on a table column header. The difference is that re-ordering is permanent, while sorting is just temporary. To re-order a list, so that all songs are ordered by their BPM values, just select a song in the list, right-click, and select Order Playlist by... -> Property from the context menu. Then select the property BPM.

Of course that's not all you can do. Obviously a choice between ascending and descending values is useful. And what about first ascending and then descending? No problem. Or ascending multiple times? That's what the Periods control is for. It lets you repeat the chosen pattern. Naturally, BPM is not the only property you can use for this. Key, mood and others are possible as well. Whenever the chosen property is circular in nature (mood, key), the selected song is taken as a starting point for a clockwise or counter-clockwise order. This is useful for harmonic mixing. Another application is workout playlists, when you want to increase intensity one or multiple times (e.g. spinning/indoor cycling).

Of course, after re-ordering like this, you can still fine-tune manually via drag and drop. In any case: I hope you enjoy this new feature.

Labels: Fitness, Harmonic Mixing, Spinning, TipsAndTricks, Workout