Beats per minute calculator, and iTunes sort question

Cafe Society
#1

I want to be able to play my iPod music or parties and such, and play songs rhythmically related. My Googling has not turned up any software that can do this automatically (well it has, but for MACs, which I don’t have), but has turned up references to some kind of hardware solutions on which you tap your foot or fingers on a pad or button in time to music, and it will calculte BPM based on counting and averaging your taps over time.

Anyone here use any of these products? Ideally i would like some kind of pocket-sized portable so I can haul it around with my iPod, with a little memory so I can store results and put them into iTunes later. But portability would be the primary feature – if need be I can jot titles and BPMs on a piece of paper.

Plus what do they cost?

And an unrelated iTunes question – my Itunes Library and my iPod sort differently. The Library ignores words like “A” and “An” and “The” when sorting by titles and sorts by the 2nd word, but the iPod sort doesn’t ignore any first words. Any parameter I can change to make them do the same sort? I don’t care a whole lot which way it sorts, I just want the two to sort the same.

#2

I have seen a few cheep metronomes with the tap functuion…should be around 50 bucks

#3

I’ll look for an online BPM estimator with a tap function, I’d actually be kind of interested in that myself.

The Tama Rhythm Watch is basically the mother of all metronomes. As the link shows, they’re almost $90 new, and can sell for $70 to $75 used (just from this limited sample). That screams value, if the used ones are selling for such a high percentage of the original sale price.

Anyways, it has a tap function, BPM display, and enough features to make any drummer really, really, really want one. Triplet feels, built in common Latin 3/2 and 2/3 clave patterns. The thing does everything a metronome should do and more.

Now, on to the issue at hand. You want BPMs of the songs you plan on playing for what? Are you mixing them together at all, or just playing them back to back hoping for the same level of intensity? IIRC any good house or trance DJ has wax with BPMs listed for each track. You can gradually amp things up if you space out the BPM increases.

There’s always the tried an true method of just trying to match up one’s metronome with a track, and of course writing that down. It can work, but it takes an ear to some degree.

You could also get really rough, and use a stopwatch. Start it, start counting whole half or quarter notes, and then just do the math after one minute has elapsed.

I’m gonna look for a tap-input BPM estimator though. I’ll let you know if I find one.

#4

I found a downloadable electronic metronome, and was trying to manually figure the rate by dialing the speed up and down while listening. Yeah, it’s pretty difficult to try and dial in the correct beat, especially as there’s a slight delay starting both the music and the metronome – so i quickly gave up actually trying to synch the two, and just tried to dial in a frequency close to the music’s beat, but offset some.

It took me maybe 4 hours to do about 50 songs. Maybe I will get better and speed up, but even if I quadruple my speed it’s gonna take a long time to do 3000 tunes. Plus I could hear that the metronome beat didn’t stay regular – maybe due to my computer’s processor load or maybe it’s just not very good software. So I have very little faith in the accuracy of the process,but at least the results will be good enough to judge which songs have similar beats without working strictly from memory.

#5

Sorry it has taken me so long, I forgot to do that search. :smack:

Try these:

http://www.downloadjunction.com/product/software/76917/index.html

http://www.appabove.com/MET240metronome/

http://beat-monitor.cubic-carrot-software.qarchive.org/

http://www.palmgear.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=software.showsoftware&PartnerREF=&siteid=1&prodID=46936

http://downloads.zdnet.com/download.aspx?docid=304472

http://downloads.zdnet.com/download.aspx?docid=303700

http://downloads.zdnet.com/download.aspx?docid=291477

The first and last links listed would be where I would start, the last one might be exactly what you’re looking for. If nothing else, you certainly do have choices! :smiley:

#6

Wow! Thanks.

The last one, I had already found, but it only works on MACs, and I don’t have one. I will look over the others.