BPM made EZ

You may not know this, but iTunes can show you the BPM (beats per minute) of your songs. You can even create smart playlists based upon the BPM. This is helpful when you’re working out and you want a constant rhythm for running or Tai Bo, or if you’re planning a party playlist and don’t want slow songs to bring down the dancing frenzy. But while iTunes can store and display this information, it can’t discern the actual BPMs from your tracks. But Cadence BPM Analyzer Pro can.  

The application analyzes your music library or playlists and determines the BPM of each track. Most apps want you manually tap along to the music, and RehabTechnologies has software like that too (Cadence BPM Tapper, free). If you’re looking at a huge library, that’s a long process. We threw a 14,000-song library at it for automatic analysis, and it averaged about 3,750 tracks an hour. After four hours, a majority of our tracks had their BPMs correctly analyzed. Pushing the BPM information to iTunes took another 27 minutes.  

The Tap feature is a great backup for long-introed and DRMed songs.

Be warned though, the application is a resource hog—it ate up an average of 85 percent of our processor cycles during the analysis. Plus, not all tracks had the correct BPM. Tracks with long intros (20 seconds or more) had the incorrect information. An Atari Teenage Riot with a 38-second intro was reported to be 72 BPM when in reality it was 145 BPM. We were able to correct those problems with the manual tap-to-set BPM feature. The app also can’t analyze songs with DRM. Songs we bought from iTunes before they removed DRM came up as zero BPM, and we had to use the manual feature. The app is upfront about this limitation and even has the option to hide DRM tracks when analyzing your library.  

The bottom line. Cadence is a great utility for DJs and anyone ready for a dance party. Even with the DRM and long-intro limitations, if you want BPM info in your iTunes tracks, this is the app to get.