beaTunes News

Song and album ratings in iTunes/Music have been quite the hot topic at some point, because iTunes computed them in some cases automatically. Visually, these computed ratings were differentiated in the UI from the manually entered one by using gray as color (for the rating stars) instead of black or the accent color (usually blue).

beaTunes followed this convention. However, there were some shortcomings in how it handled computed/manual ratings in the rest of the application. First of all, when opening the Get Info panel in beaTunes, it would always show the rating in solid black, regardless whether it had been manually entered or computed. In 5.2.23 this has been changed to only showing a rating, if it has been manually entered. A similar behavior has been implemented for the multi-song Get Info panel. Only if all selected songs have the same manually entered rating, it is shown, otherwise the rating is undefined.

The second issue occurs when sorting songs by rating. By default the computed ratings were treated just like manually entered ratings. Version 5.2.23 offers an alternative (secondary) sort order. By clicking on the table header of the Rating column (not the arrow, but "Rating"), you can toggle the sort order to first sort by computed or not (note that other columns also offer similar secondary sort orders, for example, the album or artist columns).

The third issue addressed in 5.2.23 deals with the creation of Matchlists. Previously, it has been impossible to distinguish between manually entered ratings and automatically computed ones, when specifying a Matchlist filter. This is now possible by setting the new Rating (computed) field to true or false. A similar field now also exists for Album Rating (computed).

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

Changes in 5.2.23

• Improved handling of song/album ratings computed by iTunes/Music.
• Fixed "Where is Music?" error on macOS 10.14 and earlier.

Labels: macOS, Matchlist, Ratings

This maintenance update features some overall improvements and fixes a couple of issues. For details, please see the list below.

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

Changes in 5.2.20

• Fixed embedding of danceability values.
• Fixed potentially empty MatchLists when using SYNC.
• Fixed unnecessary reading of files during synchronisation on NTFS.
• Fixed unnecessary full synchronization after analysis for folder-based collections.
• Added alphanumerical sort order for keys.
• Re-enabled sharing for macOS 10.14 or later #NowPlaying.
• Moved to HTTPS for accessing DBpedia.
• Lowered CPU usage when idle and during playback.
• Updated to Java 11.0.10+9.

Labels: dancing, DBpedia, Java11, Matchlist, NTFS, Release, Twitter

For many years now, beaTunes has offered matchlists—playlists that are created not based on simple, hard yes-or-no rules, but based on softer concepts like similarity. Nevertheless, when creating matchlists, beaTunes follows a couple of rules. First of all, the ruleset, which defines what kind of similarity we are interested in. And then, a short list of explicit additional rules, like excluding podcasts or DRM-crippled tracks. In the matchlist dialog, yet more filters can be added, like limiting matches to a certain artist or genre. Besides these explicit rules and filters, beaTunes applies some additional, implicit logic:

1. The same track never appears twice.
2. There can be only one track with a given title in the matchlist.

The idea here is to disallow clean duplicates (who would want to hear the same song twice in a row?) and even duplicates that may have been released on different albums or are covers. Usually, both rules are useful—unless of course you actually want to allow tracks with the same title. Imagine creating a list of all tracks with the somewhat unoriginal title "Love." To allow creating this kind of matchlist, beaTunes has a new checkbox: Allow multiple songs with the same title. The option can be found in the matchlist creation dialog.

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

Changes in 5.2.9

• Fixed semi-randomly pausing playlists.
• Fixed interrupted/aborted synchronization.
• Added checkbox to allow duplicates in Matchlists.

Labels: Matchlist, Release

So, now that I have bored you enough with overview, libraries, analysis options, and inspection, finally I'm getting to the point of it all: Building better Playlists.

At the core of playlist creation stands a concept. Something that is supposed to make the list tick. Something that ties it all together. This can be something as common as "Best Rock of the 80ies", "Love Songs of 68", as personal as "Songs you made out to as Teenager" or as specialized as "Songs influenced by Nirvana's Nevermind". Or, if you're into working out "Driving Beats for Aerobics", "Steady Steps for Marathon Trance", and "Up and Down on two Wheels". You get the idea.

The point here is, every one of these concepts follows different rules and therefore requires different data.

Regarding data we're in luck. Analysis and Inspection should have whipped your collection in shape. But how do you find the right songs? How do you make beaTunes understand the rules?

Song Matching

Naturally, you can simply browse your library or use the filter field to search, build your lists completely manually. Another approach is called query by example. The idea is, that you choose a song and ask beaTunes to find a similar one. The $100.000 question is: What exactly is similar?

beaTunes sidesteps this question by letting you define what's important to you. This happens in the Song Matching preferences. There you can set up sets of rules that emphasize certain aspects of similarity, like tempo, mood, or color.

Creating Matchlists

Once you have created a ruleset appropriate for the playlist you want to create, select a song that the other songs are supposed to be similar to. This song is called a seed song. Then choose New Matchlist from the File menu (or use the corresponding toolbar button). beaTunes will then display the dialog shown below. Once you click OK, it will automatically create a new playlist according to the configured rules.

Building Playlists Iteratively

Matchlist are a great tool for building playlists with the click of a button. But they also take all the fun out of the creative process. beaTunes supports another way to create playlists, one that works song-by-song.

To get started, again select a song that you want to use as the first song of your list—your opener. Then click on New Playlist from Selection in the File menu. beaTunes will create a new playlist and you might want to change the default name to something better. Then select that very first, lonely song, open the View menu, and make sure that Show Matching Songs is turned on. Below the main playlist table, a panel with matching songs should appear.

To build your playlist, check out the matching songs. Once you've found a good candidate for song #2, simply drag it into the main playlist table above. You will find that beaTunes automatically selects the newly added song, triggering the match process again. So now, beaTunes shows you potential candidates for song #3. And so on... The process is also nicely demonstrated in this video. If you're unhappy with the current match ruleset, you can select another or modify the current one in the preferences. And for those people interested in harmonic mixing, I'd like to point out the key filters. They let you hide songs that are not in a defined harmonic relationship to the selected song.

Conclusion

I hope this articles helped you getting the most out of beaTunes when creating playlists. If you have further questions, please comment below or start a discussion in the support forum.

This article is part of a small series under the heading "HowDoesItAllWork".

• Part 1 explains the overarching idea behind beaTunes.
• Part 2 explains what kind of libraries beaTunes supports.
• Part 3 takes a closer look at analysis and analysis options.
• Part 4 takes you step-by-step through the inspection process.

Labels: Building Playlists, HowDoesItAllWork, Matchlist

Phil Morse from DigitalDJTips.com just featured beaTunes in his article 5 Ways To Create Better DJ Sets With beaTunes. The article contains a great video walkthrough that I can highly recommend to anyone using beaTunes. Especially the bit about manually building a set using the match table (5:20) is awesome advice.

Today I also released a minor update. As always, the release contains some more or less important fixes and improvements. You can download the software from the download section of the website.

Most important changes in 4.0.18

• Fixed read-only check on Windows.
• Fixed issue with tuning rule.
• Fixed additional matchlist filters.
• Improved timeout handling on inspection commit.

Labels: Matchlist, Release

Over the years many different people tried beaTunes. Aerobics and spinning instructors love it to prepare their classes, marathon runners to keep their pace, audiophiles to fix their tags, and DJs to detect key and BPM for their next set. But what about the tagline: Build better playlists? Why this tagline? What's the original idea?

I love to explain this.

One of beaTunes' most popular features is audio analysis. That's really just a fancy phrase for saying, the program manages somehow to measure the tempo in BPM and find out the musical key. Perhaps some other stuff like ReplayGain or automatic segmentation. The idea here is to find out something about the music that's not already in widely available textual tags. Something that helps you to see right away that there is a similarity between two audio pieces. Tempo and key are pretty good candidates, so is beaTunes' color (more or less a measure of dominant frequency ranges). In essence, via analysis, beaTunes tries to better describe your music.

The next thing beaTunes is loved for is inspection. That's what I call the systematic and automatic inspection of mostly textual tags (e.g. ID3 tags) for consistency. Is the name for a given artist always spelled the same way? Does s/he always sing in the same language? Are his/her songs in the same genre? Answers to these questions aren't easily given. But beaTunes supports you in finding issues and making decisions in order to clean up your tags. That's right, it's all about improving the available metadata, making it more consistent.

Both calculating new metadata via analysis and improving existing metadata through inspection serve one ultimate purpose: Creating playlists that rely on good metadata.

beaTunes' MatchList feature allows you to formulate rules (in the application preferences), that determine whether two songs are similar or match. If you want to create a playlist that has to have a fairly constant tempo, you can put emphasis on the "similar BPM" rule. If the same language is important to you, again, just put emphasis on the corresponding rule. To create a MatchList, simply select a template song and click on the "Create MatchList" button. beaTunes will do the rest for you.

Of course, there are other ways of building great playlists. But having additional and clean metadata is definitely helpful. And this is where beaTunes excels. This is what beaTunes was originally built for.

This article is part of a small series under the heading "HowDoesItAllWork".

• Part 2 explains what kind of libraries beaTunes supports.
• Part 3 takes a closer look at analysis and analysis options.
• Part 4 takes you step-by-step through the inspection process.
• Part 5 concludes this little series, showing how to build great playlists.

Labels: HowDoesItAllWork, id3, Matchlist

Yes, it's time again for a beaTunes Early Access release - this one's number 9.

The biggest new item is the ability to save Matchlists. Yep, that's right - you can now create Matchlists and re-run the same rules, seeds etc. to update the already created playlist. This is particularly useful, when you added a bunch of songs to your library since you created the Matchlist. Or you fine-tuned the used ruleset and want to apply these changes. Or... well, I guess you got the idea. To update a Matchlist, just CTRL/Right-click on the list icon and choose Update Matchlist.

Another major improvement for Matchlists is the selection of multiple seed songs. You don't anymore have to select all seed songs before you create the Matchlist. You can start with some easily selectable songs, open the Matchlist dialog, and then add some more songs, by simply dragging them into the dialog.

I also tried to undo the damage done to the user interface by Apple's Java 1.5.0_16 update, which left most button margins/insets in a rather unattractive state.

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 versions (even though we make a reasonable effort)
• This version will cease to function 2 weeks after its release
• You cannot buy this version

Just so that there is no doubt about it: EA9 isn't even a beta version.

And here are the download links:

• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA9 (OS X)
• beaTunes-2-0-0-EA9 (Windows)

Note for EA8 users

There will be some updates to the database.

Labels: Early Access, Matchlist, Rulesets

The 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.

Labels: BMRI, BPM, Fitness, Matchlist, Workout