Re: Looking for BPM tagger

Strange - I ran it over a series of files and while I think the results are
pretty god on the set of tracks I used (Train - Train) it seems to store the
numbers as a weird kind of scientific notation for some reason.  For
example, Meet Virginia was analyzed at 90.03 BPM - it stores the value
"0.9003" in the BPM field.  This is how ID3-TagIt (my ID tag editing program
of choice) is displaying the number.  I wonder what's up with that?

I did confirm that it seems to be keeping the tags pretty tidy and only
touching that one field.  It's also leaving out the v1 tag which I like a
lot.  I prefer to only have one tag to maintain and that will be version
2.3, thanks. :)

--Chris

-----Original Message-----
Date:    Thu, 24 Feb 2005 09:31:58 -0500
From:    Michael Wagner <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Looking for BPM tagger

At 2/24/05 05:37 AM  Thursday, Stan Abeln wrote:
I'm not looking for people that want a BPM tagger - I'm asking for
experiences with BPM taggers :-)

>Anyway, I've just ran it on a few hundred files.  It doesn't offer a 
>lot of control; it's almost 'automagic'.  Now I'll use these files for 
>some time to see if they're still okay (on the AT, in ID3-TagIt). Hope 
>you will share your findings,
>
>Stan

Hi Stan:

OK. I've used it for about 15 minutes so far.

I converted 2 folders (= 2 CDs). It took 10-15 seconds per song on a 1.8GHz
P4 with 512MB RAM. It didn't seem to disturb any tags I could see, as
checked by Tag & Rename (other than the BPM tag, of course). I didn't try
running any songs through the Audiotron - just winamp.

It made one obvious mistake - It reported that I Do (Cherish You) by 98
Degrees as 160 BPM. There's no way that's correct. I suspect, like you're
example, it's an off by 2 error, but I'll have to check it in the more
conventional way (finger tapping) to be sure. It's an understandable mistake
- the usual way these programs work is by finding a bass line or other
repetitive sound in the music, and that song really doesn't have one. The
other songs it checked seemed to be at least in the right ball park (but it
was 5AM and I was sleepy).

It does have one irritating habit. It reports the BPM to 2 decimal places.
As if either (a) it could truly measure that accurately or (b) anyone needs
it that accurate. From my perspective as a DJ, it's just needless clutter in
my way when I'm on the way to select the next song.

Since I have about 8000 songs on my hard disk so far, having them
categorized automagically sounds like a good thing to me. I may have to go
through and correct a few where it gets it wrong, but mostly I'll notice if
it says something I expect to be around 100 BPM is 200BPM. And then I'll
correct it. Still saves me hours of work.

So I'm pleased. My dream come true.

BTW, here is the original email I sent them 2 years ago. For those who care,
their answer was yes, the paid version does what I wanted. Hi there!

I'm interested in MixMeister for one thing and one thing only at the moment.
I want it to calculate BPM for every music file in a 20GB collection of
files and store the BPM numbers back into the BPM ID3 Tags in each of the
files.

I downloaded the 3 demo and it doesn't do this,
and it looks like little chance it will.

I downloaded the 4 demo and it doesn't do it either.
It seems there is some chance that it will if I get
the non-demo version, because the demo is
partly crippled.

I don't mind buying the product if it does what I need.

Does it?

Thanks in advance


http://home.cogeco.ca/~michaelwagner/personal-page.htm
"All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Sheryl Crow