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beaTunes
build better playlists |
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FAQGeneral
Is beaTunes freeware?No. beaTunes is shareware. Is the free trial somehow limited?Yes. In two ways: time and functionality. The trial version will expire after 2 weeks. You can use the inspection feature to find issues, but you cannot apply one-click solutions. Both limitations are lifted once you purchased a license. I own a beaTunes 1.x license - why should I update to beaTunes 2?We've put a lot of work into beaTunes 2 and believe it's worth it.
Doesn't that sound like a good deal? beaTunes claims that there is a newer version available. What now?Just download the new version and replace the old one.
Your 1.w.x license will cover all updates that have the same
major version number, i.e. all 1.y.z versions. The same is true for updates
from 2.w.x to 2.y.z. I paid for a license, but never received the key. What happened?Our license key email probably got caught in your spam filter. So before you contact us, please make sure to check your spam/junk folder for email from either the tagtraum.com or the beatunes.com domain. If you cannot find it in your spam folder, try our lost key form. If the form fails, too, please contact us. Note, that if our emails to you are filtered out by your spam filter, we have no way of communicating with you. This means that if you contacted us via email and we answered, you might never receive our answer due to your spam filter. I lost my license key. Can you mail it to me again?Please use our lost key form. If you are unable to get to your key using the form, please contact us. My version of beaTunes is expired. What now?If you are using a trial version:
The license key will be emailed
to you. Then start beaTunes and enter the license information
into the registration dialog. Should it not pop up automatically,
go to the If you are using an Early Access version, check this website for a new Early Access version or the final release. Something does not work. Where can I get support?If you cannot find a solution in this FAQ or the news section, please contact us at: In your support request, please state the versions of beaTunes,
iTunes, and OS X/Windows you are using. Furthermore, please let us know
how many songs are in your library and what hardware you are
running. Often the log files from I like beaTunes. How can I make sure it's still around in a year?
Buy it!
Where can I find out more about BPM detection?Marcelino Martins has a good overview page about BPM Detection. What BPM is suitable for what kind of fitness workout?This highly depends on your workout and your goals.
However, there are a number of sites and resources dedicated to
working out to music, specifically with an iPod: Installation
How can I find out, which version of OS X I am using?Click on the apple symbol on the very left of your menu bar and select How can I find out, which version of Windows I am using?There are multiple ways: What's the difference between the Windows version and the Windows version with JRE?beaTunes requires a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run properly.
On Windows, it can use a public Java version that is already installed on your computer or
it can use its own private copy of Java. Where can I get the right Java™ version?On Mac, beaTunes requires Java 5.0 >= Release 7. For OS 10.4 (Tiger), you can get the free universal binary from Apple. If you are running OS 10.5 (Leopard), please make sure you are using the latest version and also have the latest Java Update installed, by running the Software Update process from the Apple menu. On Windows, beaTunes requires Java 6.0 >= Update 12 (a.k.a. 1.6.0_12). You can get the
Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for free from Sun. How can I check, which Java™ version is currently installed on my system?If you are using a Mac,
open java -version
and hit enter. java version "1.5.0_16" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_16-b06-284) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_16-133, mixed mode, sharing) A greater version should be fine, too. On Windows, click on java -version and hit enter. java version "1.6.0_12" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.6.0_12-b06) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_12-b06, mixed mode, sharing) A greater version should be fine, too. A 32bit version of the VM is essential though. If you are doubting that you have the right Java version, simply install the beaTunes package that comes bundled with a JRE. Using beaTunes
How can I make beaTunes analyze protected tracks?There is no easy way to achieve this. DRM protected tracks cannot be analyzed. The reason is obvious: If beaTunes could easily access the raw audio data for analysis, it could just as easily create an unprotected copy. Until recently most songs purchased from the iTunes Store are DRM protected. As a DRM-free alternative to the iTunes Store you might want to check out Amazon's MP3 store. Every time I switch from another application to beaTunes, I see the blue spinning ball and beaTunes is slow. What's happening?Whenever you switch from another application to beaTunes,
beaTunes synchronizes with iTunes to catch up on external changes
to the iTunes Music Library. With large libraries, this can be a little
annoying. Since in many cases there are either no
or only insignificant changes, you can turn this feature off.
Just go to What is the 'color' good for?The song 'color' determined by beaTunes is a measure of how a song sounds in relationship to the other songs in your library. I.e. blue songs sound more similar to each other than to red songs. What is the 'key' good for?Knowing the key a song is in, can help you picking songs that match harmonically. This is in essence the basis for a DJ technique called harmonic mixing. Songs in the same key, relative, dominant or subdominant keys usually mix well, while others often sound dissonant. When creating Matchlists with beaTunes, the Matching Key rule takes exactly these relationships into account when calculating the match quality, helping you to create harmonious mixes. Why should I analyze the language of my songs' lyrics?Well, of course you don't have to. But if your collection is a mixture of say Spanish and English songs, maybe you'd like to be able to sort them by language. It would make it a whole lot easier to create mix-tapes in just one language. The built-in language analysis works on two levels: First it looks
at the lyrics you may have stored in iTunes. If you haven't done that, you might want to
look them up using the Additionally, there is also an inspection that tells you when an artist has songs in different languages or some with a language and others with none. How can I tag songs and why should I?beaTunes allows you to assign tags to individual
songs, much like del.icio.us.
This does not only help to improve the match process, but can
also be very convenient, when searching for a particular song
or group of songs. How can I use beaTunes for blogging about music?Whenever you select a playlist or one or more songs
in beaTunes you can open the blog editor either through the
context menu or through How can I cancel the analysis of one or more songs?Go to the How can I cancel the analysis of all songs?Go to the The BPM estimated by beaTunes is twice/half as fast as the actual BPM. Why is that and how can I fix this?To most BPM analyzers (incl. beaTunes) a song that has a BPM of 120 looks
very much like a song that has a BPM of 60 or even 30. Therefore
you need to specify the approximate range of BPM you expect, when
you start the analysis. However, sometimes this is hard - especially
when you analyze hundreds of songs. Therefore beaTunes offers several
ways to correct the measured BPM. What's the fastest way to analyze just BPM?Since version 1.0.1 beaTunes contains some optimizations for analyzing just color or just BPM. To take advantage of this, select only BPM in the Analysis Options dialog (no color, no silence, ...) and set the precision slider to Fast. These settings will significantly speed up the analysis. If you have a multicore or multiprocessor machine
you should also try to increase the number of tasks processed in parallel.
This can be done in the On an Intel Core 2 Duo running OS X, switching from one task to two tasks in parallel almost doubles the analysis speed. On Windows the speedup is not as great. How can I update to a new version of beaTunes?On Mac, just replace your old beaTunes app. If OS X asks you whether you want to replace the old application, say yes. On Windows, uninstall the old version. Make sure that you do not have the installer delete Color and BPM data. Then download the new Windows installer and open it. Do I have to analyze all songs in my music library in one session?No. You can shutdown beaTunes at any time and resume analysis simply by starting beaTunes again. Why aren't the BPMs showing up in Rane Serato Scratch Live?If the BPM are showing up in iTunes, rescan the id3 tags
in the setup part of Serato. Then, again in Serato, click the little
arrow that points left directly under the search bar in the main
screen. It will drop a menu that will enable you to select
BPM's as one of your options. How can I lookup titles and artists for tracks that have no information associated with them?If you ripped a lot of songs while you were offline or simply before
CDDB was used, your tracks may have meaningless titles like Analyze these songs with the If you don't trust the automatic process you can choose To find out even more about a particular song using MusicBrainz,
Amazon or discogs, you may
also want to use the Please note that MusicBrainz is a non-profit effort. It depends on individuals like yourself to provide high quality data. Consider contributing by volunteering as an editor. How can I configure beaTunes to read the iTunes library on my external harddrive?Just open the beaTunes Note, that on OS X, the external drives are not listed on the same level as your internal harddrive. To see external drives, select your internal drive, then select the Volumes folder. I have multiple iTunes libraries. How can I work with beaTunes?Typically autodetects the library you are currently working with. It will prompt you
to configure the libary you are using, should it not find the right Technical
How can I add my own analysis code? Is there a plugin API?beaTunes is written in a way that makes it possible to easily add custom analysis tasks, inspections and background themes. Some more info can be found in the beaTunes plugin API section. Please contact us via email with any questions you might have. Is beaTunes a universal binary? Will it run natively on Intel and PPC Macs?Yes. Most of beaTunes is written in Java, which will run with the native JVM installed on your system. Some parts are native code built as 32 bit universal binary. Why isn't beaTunes using QuickTime to access protected audio files?beaTunes is using QuickTime/CoreAudio. Unfortunately QuickTime only allows the
playback of protected files, but not transcoding. This means that QuickTime
does not allow the extraction of the raw audio data, which is needed for
analysis. In fact, not even the playback of protected movie files
necessarily works. Analysis takes a long time. Is this because beaTunes is written in Java?If beaTunes was written in assembler, analysis would probably be faster.
Chances are, that beaTunes would also crash much more often. Contrary to
common perception the speed of Java has caught up quite a bit compared to
early versions from almost ten years ago. Pretty much every recent benchmark
that compares Java with C or C++ has concluded that Java is typically
2-3 times slower than C and in many cases
as
fast as C++ or faster.
This means that nowadays mainly the code quality determines whether a C implementation
is faster than a Java implementation. |
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"tagtraum industries incorporated", the dreaming cog wheel logo and "beaTunes" are trademarks of tagtraum industries incorporated. All other trademarks are held by their respective owners. tagtraum industries incorporated is not affiliated with any of the respective trademark owners. |
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