I have an iPod and use iTunes to upload/manage its music.
What software can I get to edit songs - specifically, to cut off long endings or cut out something from the middle of a song? I have songs with boring endings, with those “secret” tracks after 10 minutes of silence and the previous song, etc., and would like to edit them down and put them on my iPod as the trimmed version. Free is better!
Also, a bonus would be if I could find a way to list the song’s bpm (beats per minute) or something similar - going through my library song by song to figure out if it’s fast enough for my exercise mix is really dull.
Cutting off long endings is easy. Select the song in question, then go to File > Get Info (or hit Cmd-I, Ctrl-I under Windows.) Under the Options Tab, check the “Stop Time” box and enter the time of the track when you would like playback to stop.
Excising silence from the middle of the track is harder. The only way I know how to do this without separate software is to import the track twice, once with the “Stop Time” enabled as above and once with the “Start Time” box enabled and set to the start of the hidden track.
Displaying the BPM field in iTunes is easy: go to View > View Options and check the BPM box. You can also make a Smart Playlist containing only songs in a given BPM range; syncing this playlist with your iPod would then allow you to select good workout songs easily. (Unfortunately, there’s no way to display BPM directly on the iPod.)
Of course, you still have to provide iTunes with the BPM for each song, which can be tedious; there exist third-party programs & plug-ins that try to automatically detect the BPM of an MP3 file, but I’m not sure how successful they’ve gotten since I last tried them out (five or six years ago.)
Thanks for the info - sounds like it isn’t the most elegant means but it might do.
The bpm thing is annoying; if I could find something that would more-or-less automate the process of analyzing a song I’d prefer that. I would like more control over actually creating the playlist since not all of my high-bpm songs are ideal exercise music.