BeaTunes - 2.0.18

I thought my 7000+ song collection was well organized but after BeaTunes analyzed my music, I found out how wrong I was. BeaTunes saved me from a lot of painstaking, time consuming tag cleanup. It has been worth the money. However, the program either crashes or freezes almost every time I use it. I haven't lost anything so far and the program restarts where it left off. I still recommend it.

So if you just happen to be someone like me who just feels the NEED to have EVERYTHING filled out, COVERS/ LYRIi seem to like just about everything in this program so give it a go

It seems to work well, with the following exceptions:

1. It would not calculate the BPM or get artwork, etc for iTunes "locked" files.
2. It is slooooooooooow. It needed just shy of 12hrs to analyze 3000 songs.

This is just my experience with it. I also tried Tangerine. It too worked well with a few exceptions, but it analyzed and calculated the BPM for my files in about 3 hours.

Hope this helps someone.

Cheers,

TOny

It opens and states that it's synchronizing with my iTunes library, but when it's done, it simply quits. It might work for you though. Try it.

Beatunes is a monster. I would never point a bazooka at a mosquito and I would never run Beatunes on a couple dozen files and expect to learn anything. But boy howdy, if you need a bazooka to point at something...

Beatunes requires a substantial investment in processor time before you'll really get any benefit out of it. It's got to span your music library, process all of your music and build its own database. I've got 80-some gigs of music (and the CDs to prove it, officer!) and it took the better part of a week to crunch the library down.

So what do you get once you're done?

Well, I open up Beatunes, pick a song I like, open up the preferences to tweak "matchability" (Beatunes uses 11 different parameters to pick its matches, all of which are adjustable) and make a "matchlist" out of them. Then I close Beatunes and load the list on the iPod. I wouldn't have to - Beatunes lets you stream directly into iTunes if both applications are open.

It's great if you need a new soundtrack for running, for working out in the gym, for going with the romantic dinner at home, for finding angry music to write poetry to, whatever. Again, if your library is small and you've got every song you own at the tip of your brain, you might not get much utility out of it. But if, like me, you're sitting on top of a thousand albums going back twenty years, Beatunes will give you an awesome slice through them.

Beatunes is also handy for people who rip their own libraries or subscribe to eMusic or buy a bunch of Russian MP3s on a regular basis: the file maintenance that Beatunes performs is pretty handy. It finds similar (but not identical) names, genres, song titles, whatever, and gives you an easy way to merge them.

Shorter version: If you're using iTunes enough that you wish there were more, better ways to interact with it, Beatunes is a great investment. If you want to be reminded of all the cool music you already own, Beatunes is a great investment. If you're used to doing your file fixes in iTunes with a bunch of haxie Applescripts, Beatunes is a great investment.