bpm exchange

[lipi]

beats per minute aren't everything, but it's handy to have them around, init? too bad it's such a pain to calculate them (even with the tap bpm widget and its ilk--the values fluctuate too much with my erratic tapping). i get lazy, and leave half my tracks un-bpm-ed because i can't be bothered to hit the space bar for an entire chorus.

so i propose the bpm exchange. you enter values for all tracks on a new album? copy and paste 'em here, and maybe someone else will benefit.

my latest acquisition (thanks jesse for the recommendation):

Paul Tillotson Love Trio
Lindy Hop Heaven: Live at Jelly Roll

1 Mildred's Intro -
2 Satin Doll 105
3 Shotgun Boogie 168
4 Dear Old Dad 135
5 Soul Swinga Nova (Soul Bossa Nova) 136
6 Pink Panther 107
7 The Way You Look Tonight 144
8 C Jam Blues 185
9 Big Swinging Taxi (Big Yellow Taxi) 127
10 Tebadadeda 146
11 Easy Does It 125
12 Blackbird 125
13 Lindy Hop Blues 57
14 Tidbits 169
15 Blues for Stephanie 131

in the good tradition of this forum, feel free to flame me if you think this is a stupid idea.

[trev]

The idea is a noble one, but for me it's faster to tap out a few seconds of each song rather than copy and paste the numbers into the BPM field

[fredo]

agreed, a noble idea. BUT, i think using a forum as a catalog of album bpms would be messy and difficult to search through (considering the weaknesses of the search feature). perhaps you should start a google doc, or something people could be linked to and edit?

Like Trev though, I would probably just bpm the tracks myself. When I get a new album I like to give each song a listen as I bpm them so that I have some initial memory of what the songs sound like.

good luck!

[CountBasi]

What software do you use Trev to do that, capture the data and put it into the file information?

[trev]

What software do you use Trev to do that, capture the data and put it into the file information?

I use iTunes-BPM Inspector (click on More Projects in the side menu)
"iTunes-BPM adds a simple floating window to iTunes that allows you to set the beats-per-minute value for the currently playing song by tapping along to the music. "

You simply click on the "set" button when you have a stable BPM value and it adds it to the BPM field of the currently playing song. Very fast and easy.

[Haydn]

Yeah, collaborative projects are great, but I'm not sure whether this would work (unless perhaps done on a large scale - like get a group of people together and do, say, all the songs by a number of bands, one band each.) I've also thought about collaboratively DJing a set via the web, one song each - all you would need would be some server space to upload songs to, and some simple listing software to display the song details - that could be great fun.

By the way, what ever happened to this idea?

[mr. e]

beats per minute aren't everything, but it's handy to have them around, init? too bad it's such a pain to calculate them (even with the tap bpm widget and its ilk--the values fluctuate too much with my erratic tapping).

http://www.vitavonni.de/projekte/bpm-toy.html.en
It's really trivial to use on Linux, but apparently installation on Windows is a bit more complicated (you need like five library packages for the programming language used and the UI, the actual application then is just 0.003 MB).

But it's not just yet another tap tool, it uses some clever math to get a more reliable estimation, and it will also show you an error margin. I've played around with first tapping crappy, then actually putting some effort into it, and the detected error margins went down quickly. So it even knows how 'stable' your tapping is. I usually get down to like +- 2 bpm, and that is easily good enough for my needs. It also has these blinking icons in the upper right that are a good control. Usually after tapping a few bars I stop and watch them another few bars to check if the speed matches and then copy the values. So far that has worked very well, they always flash well in sync with the music. Still doesn't save you the need to tap though, nor much time.

All my experiments with fully automatic bpm computation were much worse. Not to say frequently totally worthless, makes you wonder if they just count the number of detected beats and divide that by the song length or so ... so tools like this are still the most useful ones for me. I've been on a DJ setup that had two bpm counters (one in the CD player, one on the Mixer) and both were off on a song, but differently off. And they never give you much feedback except sometimes blinking when they are about to give up even showing a value.

I like your idea of exchanging BPM values, but to me also the main thing is how to get them easily out of and into my files. Looking them up on some web page isn't much faster than tapping them myself.

And I don't have the ambition of tapping all the songs I have. First I'd try to actually split up my songs into stuff that I'd play and stuff I can leave at home... Too bad so few CD producers ship them with BPM lists.

[mr. e]

Hi folks,
I would have pretty much all the code needed in place to make a web based song database for the BPM values. That is, I have all my music in a database with that information, it's pretty quick at looking up songs even with fuzzy matching. I've had lots of fun by throwing in some paragraphs into the search field and checking out the songs that come up as best matches.
I've also used this to import playlists I found on the web, if I have the song in my database it is usually found. For songs that I have, the database will of course return other songs, but the score value helps a lot at detecting them. I've done the same to iTunes library files, converting their playlists on a best-match basis to playlists of my own music.

Anyway, the key message is this: I could easily make a database you could search by artist, album, song, gerne, comment, etc. and that will include BPM values.
And the big plus: if you upload your iTunes library files (iTunes library.xml; NOT the actual songs), I could import all the BPM values (and ratings, comments, etc.!)

If there are some people around that:
- have reliable BPM values for their songs
- have BPM for a larger amount of songs
- have the files sensibly tagged (title, artist, album)
- are willing to share their iTunes library file
then I'd setup such a search engine.

Since I don't use iTunes, I won't be able to write you an "import script" in iTunes; but maybe someone else could contribute that. I think iTunes has some scripting capabilities. A fully automatic import would not be sensible anyway:
- matching will be on a best-match basis, to allow for spelling differences (Slim & Slam vs. Slim Gaillard and Slam Steward), and to allow finding results for the same song on a different album as well
- there might be different version of the same song (even on the same album, e.g. different takes) that actually have different BPM
- different users might have different BPM/Rating/Comment values assigned to the song, and then when importing you'll have to choose whom to trust. Taking the average BPM isn't sensible I guess.

Still this could be useful. But I guess I'll only do that if a couple of people actually contribute enough data to give the database a sensible amount of data. Anyone?

Despite me not even being an iTunes user, the first version will probably NOT allow other contributions except by uploading an iTunes library. Just because that means I only need to be able to process one kind of data, and I have the impression that iTunes is the most popular program amongs swing DJs. But that will also keep out spam. If a couple of people suggest some other application I can sensibly write an importer for, I'll try to add that of course.)

Note that to contribute it should be sufficient to have iTunes 'import' your music (just make sure it doesn't trash your folder, there is some setting somewhere to tell iTunes to not move files around) and send me the library. Even when you use other programs to set your BPM, iTunes should be able to gather this information from the files.

If you are willing to contribute, feel free to just send me your iTunes Library.xml (note that I need the .xml version of that file, AFAIK there are two files written by iTunes?), to raycast AT hotmail DOT com.

My fear is that too many people will consider their tagging and tapping work to be too precious to share without a comparably strong way of getting data back.

[falty411]

Paul Tillotson Love Trio
Lindy Hop Heaven: Live at Jelly Roll

1 Mildred's Intro -
2 Satin Doll 105
3 Shotgun Boogie 168
4 Dear Old Dad 135
5 Soul Swinga Nova (Soul Bossa Nova) 136
6 Pink Panther 107
7 The Way You Look Tonight 144
8 C Jam Blues 185
9 Big Swinging Taxi (Big Yellow Taxi) 127
10 Tebadadeda 146
11 Easy Does It 125
12 Blackbird 125
13 Lindy Hop Blues 57
14 Tidbits 169
15 Blues for Stephanie 131

If that is "Lindy Hop Heaven", please make sure i'll go straight to hell

[fredo]

yeah, but now you'll now exactly how fast or slow you'll be getting to hell!

[Mr Awesomer]

Paul Tillotson Love Trio
Lindy Hop Heaven: Live at Jelly Roll

If that is "Lindy Hop Heaven", please make sure i'll go straight to hell

The Dream Team
Lindy Hop Hell: Live at the Lindy Binge

[CafeSavoy]

If that is "Lindy Hop Heaven", please make sure i'll go straight to hell

Request accepted.

The Dream Team
Lindy Hop Hell: Live at the Lindy Binge

You sure you want to resurrect that jive junction thread.

[Mr Awesomer]

You sure you want to resurrect that jive junction thread.

Which one... all of them? haha

[lipi]

o.k., no one else seems to hate tapping the space bar, so i'll give these bpm widgets another go. thanks.

[djstarr]

o.k., no one else seems to hate tapping the space bar, so i'll give these bpm widgets another go. thanks.

you can always get some good DJ software - JRiver Media Center analyzes the BPM for you when you rip the CD; there is a bug in it so that most songs over 150 bpm are listed at half tempo, but that is an easy adjustment to fix. Best use of $40 ever - a great organizing library and autoBPM. I personally hated tapping the space bar.....