beaTunes News

One of the unique features of beaTunes 5 is the ability to show song keys as if the song was played at a different tempo. “World Sick” by Broken Social Scene is usually in C Major (1d) with a tempo of 118 BPM. If we played the song a bit faster using a DJ software like Traktor, say at 125 BPM, what key would it be in? The answer is D♭ Major (8d). beaTunes can show you this.

But why would you want to know this? How is this useful? If you're DJing using Harmonic Mixing, you need to know what key songs are in to create smooth transitions. Obviously the transition becomes even smoother, if the tempo also matches. There are three ways to achieve this:

1. You only use songs that are in the desired key and have a matching tempo.
2. You pick some song you really like and adjust pitch (key) and tempo using your DJ software.
3. You pick a song that is in the target key when played with the matching tempo.

To unlock this feature you obviously first need to analyze your music, so that both tempo and key are known. Then simply click on the little Kebab menu at the right edge of the main table's header.

Clicking on the Kebab menu opens the table's View Options dialog. At its bottom you can turn on SYNC, the feature that cause beaTunes to show song keys, as if they were played with a different tempo.

Once SYNC is on, beaTunes displays the shifted key, i.e. the key a song would be in when played at a certain target tempo.

Additionally, you can also configure the matching songs table to display keys as if played at the tempo of the song in the main table. To do so, just click on its SYNC button. Isn't this super cool?! I believe this feature is indispensable when mixing harmonically without time-scale modification.

Enjoy!

PS: To avoid confusion and disappointment, beaTunes cannot play a song at any other tempo than the original tempo. Time-scaling or pitch-shifting are not supported. You will need a proper DJ playback software for that.

Labels: BPM, Harmonic Mixing, Key, TipsAndTricks

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

beaTunes 5 will contains some neat features to help DJs mix harmonically. In the View -> View Options dialog, you can now find two changes. The first having to do with the way artwork is displayed (size and height). That one is pretty self-explanatory. But the second one, in the lower left corner of the dialog, may not be so obvious.

The new SYNC-button let's you change how a song's key is displayed, if both key and BPM are available. Assume you have a song in C major with a tempo of 100 BPM. When you press the SYNC-button and set the tempo value to 94.4 BPM, beaTunes will display the key the song would be in, if it was played at 94.4 BPM (without key lock). In this case B major. This feature is meant for DJs who prefer not to use key lock, but rather play tracks slower or faster to match both beat and key. In this context, beaTunes serves purely as a discovery tool. It does not support changing the playback speed in any way. Apropos discovery tool: the matching songs panel now offers a SYNC-button as well. This means you can easily find songs matching harmonically at the tempo of the selected song (if your ruleset contains the matching key rule).

I hope this feature proves useful to a lot of working DJs out there.

Labels: Harmonic Mixing, Key

More or less as a consequence of some unannounced Discogs API changes from 2/20/2015, beaTunes 4.0.20 was released today. Primary purpose of this update is to re-enable cover art import from Discogs via the Import metadata analysis task and the Get Info dialog pane. Another minor change in this release is an improved Similar Key rule, which now takes the "diagonal" mix as well as several energy boost mixes into account. This should help finding a good transition order, when using a match ruleset with emphasis on key, as additional transitions become feasible. For a good overview of harmonic mixing techniques, take a look at this article by Radley Marx. Diagonal key transitions are now also considered, i.e. there is no warning for them in the transition column anymore.

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

Most important changes in 4.0.20

• Fixed Discogs cover fetching caused by Discogs API change.
• Added diagonal mix (Xd <-> X+1m) to valid key transitions.
• Improved similar key rule to support diagonal mix and energy boost.
• Improved 'Open in MusicBrainz'.
• Moved to CASampledSP 0.9.9.
• Moved to japlscript 3.1.1.

Update

There was a minor mess-up with the OS X version of this release, related to dylib dependencies, which is now fixed. If you see a related error message, please simply download again.

Labels: BPM, Discogs, Harmonic Mixing, Key, MusicBrainz, Release

It's been requested many times, but so far there just wasn't time. Now it's finally built-in: Configurable key formats. This means, that beaTunes can now display the tonal key in several different formats (traditional, OK-Notation, Wall Clock, etc). And for those, who are still unhappy with the built-in formats, there is an API that allows you to create custom renderers.

For those of you, who use the KeyToComment-plugin, please note that there is an update available via the beaTunes plugins preference pane. The plugin now features the ability to choose a key format.

To avoid misunderstandings: beaTunes still writes the same standard information to Id3 tags—exactly as it is defined in the specification. But it is now capable of displaying this information in multiple different ways. In other words, the Id3 TKEY frame will not suddenly contain information formatted in OK-Notation, just because it is rendered as such in the beaTunes user interface. This is to ensure interoperability between different applications.

Besides this addition, v4.0.4 contains some important bug fixes for Windows users who keep their music on network shares. Interesting for everybody is a fix for a bug that led to missing BPM values in iTunes when analyzing with Use online resources turned on.

As always, you can download the software from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.0.4

• Fixed use online resources for BPM (0 values).
• Fixed ignore solution for acoustic. duplicates.
• Fixed UNC path support.
• Moved to FFSampledSP 0.9.7.
• Moved to MFSampledSP 0.9.4.
• Added interface for custom key text renderers.
• Segment analysis of songs longer than 30min now skipped.

Labels: FFmpeg, Harmonic Mixing, Key, MediaFoundation, OK-Notation, Plugin, Release, TipsAndTricks

Just to let you know... Open Key Notation now has some public domain artwork to go along with the numbers.

Enjoy the weekend!

Labels: Harmonic Mixing, OK-Notation

It's been only a week since EA3, but since a couple of things changed, I'd like to pick up the pace a little bit. Some of you might have noticed that in EA3 several analysis tasks didn't work when use online resources was turned on. This is now fixed along with a number of other little things.

In today's announcement, I'd like to highlight a new feature DJs should be interested in—if they're into harmonic mixing. For a long time, beaTunes has offered key detection, but unfortunately this is of limited use, when the instruments used in different recordings aren't tuned the same way. Typically, one tunes for the 4th A to be at 440Hz (concert pitch). But this isn't always the case. When analyzing the key (with use online resources turned off), beaTunes now also calculates the used tuning, if it can be determined with enough accuracy.

As shown in the image, beaTunes displays both the actual A4 frequency in Hz and also the deviation from the regular concert pitch tone in cents. Each cent represents 1/100 semitone. Thus 50 cents deviation mean that the tuning is shifted by half a semitone.

So when looking for a harmonically matching song, you can now take tuning into account. Obviously, a similar tuning will match better than one that is quite different.

As always, there is some more info in the NOTES.txt file.

Alright, here's the obligatory warning: Before downloading and installing this, please make sure you understand what Early Access means:

• Absolutely no warranty for whatever
• Features may or may not work, appear, and disappear
• It may not be possible to migrate data to future or previous versions (even though I make a reasonable effort)
• This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
• You cannot buy this version

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-3-0-0-EA4 (OS X 10.5.8 or later)
• beaTunes-3-0-0-EA4 (Windows XP or later)

Important

This EA version changes beaTunes' internal database layout quite a bit, which takes a while. Do not interrupt this process, even if it takes very long! beaTunes 2.x will not be able to use the database anymore, after you ran beaTunes 3.0. If you intend to try 3.0 and then go back to 2.x, make sure you back up the database before you try 3.0 (depending on your OS it's in ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes/Database, C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database or C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\database)! You also might want to check out this article about exporting beaTunes data.

Please provide feedback!

Thanks.

Labels: Early Access, Harmonic Mixing, Tuning

For a long time people have been asking me to introduce the Camelot notation to beaTunes. Unfortunately, the company that invented that notation, believes it can force other companies to license the scheme from it - a concept more than a few people disagree with. What is needed, is a truly free and open notation that features the advantages of a numeric key notation. In other words:

Nobody will ever be forced to license the scheme or - even worse - pay fees to use it.

Surprisingly, this isn't hard to achieve at all. Any harmonic mixing scheme must be based on the so called Circle of Fifths - a concept hundreds of years old. In it, neighboring keys typically match pretty well.

Circle of Fifths illustration by Just Plain Bill

All one needs to do to make it a little easier for non-musicians, is to assign numbers to each key and a letter for the mode (i.e. major or minor).

The Open Key Notation (OK-Notation) does just that. In it, the very top of the circle, i.e. A minor and C major, are denoted by a 1. The next keys in clockwise direction (G major and E minor), are denoted by a 2 and so forth. Major keys are annotated with a d (for German dur), minor keys with an m (for German moll). So C major becomes 1d.

From release 2.1.19 on, beaTunes will display the classic key name, a color, and the OK-Notation. MixMeister already displays keys in a fairly similar fashion. I hope other programs will follow.

Labels: Harmonic Mixing, Key, OK-Notation

Back in April I posted about the beaTunes entry on Wikipedia. Somebody was so nice to create the entry, but unfortunately it still has a broken link, it is not linked to from other pages and the entry itself isn't all that accurate. I tried to follow Wikipedia procedure and added some comments on the article's discussion page and notified involved authors, but nobody made the necessary changes.

If you feel like you'd like to contribute to Wikipedia, please correct and improve the beaTunes entry!

Thanks!

... and if you feel the German Wikipedia should have a beaTunes entry as well, please create it!

Update 7/27/2009: Awesome! Somebody fixed that broken link to Harmonic Mixing! Now if only somebody expanded the article a little, added the fact that beaTunes does key detection, etc. that would be more than grand!

Labels: Harmonic Mixing, Wikipedia

beaTunes 2.0.8 is out. Here's the short list of changes:

• Fixed 'Analyze/Inspect New Songs'
• Amazon requests are now signed
• Deleted tracks are now moved to trash/recycling bin, if possible
• Switched key notation to flats
• Added clock hand to key

I'd like to give a little bit more detail about the last three items.

Before 2.0.8, deleted tracks were only removed from the iTunes database, but the actual files remained on the harddrive. 2.0.8 changes this - files are now deleted (or put in the trash/recycling bin). For more info on this and on how to delete files of duplicates that you removed with pre 2.0.8, see this posting.

The key notation was switched from sharps to flats, because many users using the Camelot wheel find it easier to refer to keys in this notation. Because the company that came up with the wheel, regards the number code their intellectual property, we can't simply display that number. But to make things a little easier, I added a little clock hand to the key color. This hand points in the same direction in which the key would be located on the Camelot wheel, thus making it easier to figure out what keys match harmonically.

Much of these enhancements are based on user input (Thank you!) - I really hope this improves the quality and usefulness of the software for harmonic mixing.

Labels: Harmonic Mixing, Key, Release