beaTunes News

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Re-Ordering Playlists by Property

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.

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Saturday, March 1, 2008

Prevention Magazine features beaTunes

beaTunes LogoIn its March 2008 issue, Prevention Magazine features a story titled Workout Songs for Fitness Walking. It's all about making a good walk more fun - and what better way is there than to listen to your favorite upbeat tunes. beaTunes is recommended as a tool for measuring the tempo (BPM) of your music, in order to generate a better mix. About.com has a similar web page. While About.com recommends BPM of 115-120 for walking, Prevention lists songs with BPM from 115-160.

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

The right music makes you faster!

beaTunes LogoThe right music can motivate you to perform significantly better in your daily workout routine and even in competition. That's the gist of a number of recent articles in The New York Times, the British Telegraph and other reputable publications. They all quote the work of Dr. Costas Karageorghis, reader in Sports Psychology at Brunel University. According to his studies, six factors contribute most to the motivational properties of music:

  • rhythm
  • genre
  • melody (tune)
  • tempo (BPM)
  • sound of the instruments
  • beat

Together, these six factors can be measured with the Brunel Music Rating Inventory (BMRI-2).

According to the NYT article, Dr. Karageorghis found that one of the most important elements is a song’s tempo, which should be between 120 and 140 beats-per-minute, or BPM.

Since beaTunes lets iTunes users measure the BPM of their songs, it is an ideal tool to help people improve their workout playlists. Furthermore, with its configurable Matchlist feature it actively supports users in considering more than just one factor when building playlist.

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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Nike+ Blogging

The other day we came across a nice example of combing the beaTunes blogging feature with Nike+iPod, in particular Rush Frisby's Nike+iPod website widget:

justagirl.com/nike/

Check it out at justagirl.com/nike/

What a neat way of keeping track of your workouts!

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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

All Nike shoes Nike+ shoes soon?

beaTunes Logoars technica has an interesting news story about Nike planning to make all Nike shoes Nike+ compatible by the end of 2007.

Obviously beaTunes is an ideal Nike+ companion.

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