In my continuing quest to tag my music with metadata to create better playlists, I tried adding beats per minute (BPM) data into my mp3s. Seeing that I have more than 15k songs, I knew I was going to have to find a program that would do it automatically, so I looked around and chose beaTunes. Using the default mix of quality vs. speed, it took at least 36 hours of processing time to do my entire library.

While beaTunes other major feature is the ability to create mixes and song suggestions based on that BPM data, my point was to see if it would be useful in iTunes because that is my preferred application. Through some preliminary testing, I’m not finding that much good out of it. Creating a playlist strictly by BPM, I’m finding that a mix of incorrect BPM analysis (songs tagged at 80 BPM are really probably 160 BPM) and genre hopping (going from rap to rock to soul to metal) is causing the experience to not be as amazing as I had hoped.

There are times when a few songs really do match up well, but you would still really have to either a) know which songs have a wrong BPM and fix them, or b) really know your library enough to spot obvious mismatches and shuffle things accordingly. With over 15,000 songs I don’t think I can do either, so my options are to either find a better BPM tagger, or go back to not caring.

Any suggestions, or recommendations of other BPM taggers?