geeky musings; or, I hung out with too many DJ's this weekend

[lauralh]

I wonder if it's possible, through wave analysis (IE the fast-fourier transformation), to figure out the BPM of a song. Because then you could run it, and have your MP3s sorted by folders or playlists named 120BPM, 130BPM, etc. Then if you wanted to mix stuff it would be easy.

Comments

[shelbinator.livejournal.com]

I thought several of the available mixing packages automatically figured that stuff out for ya? 'Cause they tend to tout their ability to mix tracks by setting two points across which you want the two speeds to merge or something....

Or perhaps I'm hallucinating.

Or perhaps they expect you to enter the BPM info manually. Hmmm.
*wishing I had more free time for that*

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

There's shareware (http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-1896426-100-1475543.html?tag=st.dl.10001-103-1.lst-7-1.1475543) that figures it out, so I'm sure there's real programs that do what I actually talked about.

[hotcrab.livejournal.com]

how about writing some software
that could go through some giant archive of music and
tell me which tracks were good,
and which ones weren't?

then, even if i never listened to any of them
i could still talk like i was cool

Oddly enough...

[wanton-bliss.livejournal.com]

... I tried to do this exact thing at my last job (determining BPM of music through FFT/wave analysis). I needed it for the purposes of syncing up interactive electronic art pieces with music beats. Alas, I never quite got it working... had a lot of problems with filtering out extraneous aspects of the waveform. We later found a hardware solution of sorts, little black boxes that claim to be able to determine the BPM and are used by DJs for syncing up selections and MIDI driven devices. But it really wasn't all that more reliable than my software solution.

good to know

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

By the way, you're marvelous.

Wow.

[wanton-bliss.livejournal.com]

The compliments are really flying as of late.

heh

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

but that was a strictly geek-admiration.