New Software Assembles BPM Playlists for iTunes

Tagtraum industries has published new and powerful software for automatic playlist creation in iTunes, called beaTunes 1.0.

This software analyzes musical tracks to figure out their tempo and atmosphere. When applied to a playlist or music library, it can even automatically build playlists that work together based on the tempo information (the BPM field).

The software cannot analyze digital rights-managed tracks because of the usage-limiting software these tracks are sold with, but for tracks burned from CD or acquired from online stores that sell music DRM-free, beaTunes can:

• automatically determine beats per minute and store the result in iTunes

• sort existing playlists so that matching songs succeed each other

• create matchlists—playlists based on one or more sample songs

• browse songs from your music collection that match the currently selected song

• automatically set start and end times of songs based on their volume

Additional features include album recommendations, integration with Blogger.com and a tag editor.

BeaTunes is a Java application and compiled neither for PowerPC nor for Intel. However, it is launched with a PowerPC binary, the so-called JavaApplicationStub. This causes the Finder to indicate that it is a PowerPC application. However, it uses the native Java Virtual Machine to run, meaning it doesn’t actually run on Rosetta emulation, but as a native application.

The software costs US$19.95, and a trial version is available for download from the company.

-Macworld staff, Macworld.co.uk

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