Matchlists

If you have ever played with iTunes' smart playlists, you know that it is actually quite hard to generate a good playlist. To ease this task, beaTunes can offer an alternative:

Matchlists

Instead of following hard rules like smart playlists, matchlists are created with a couple of seed songs and a set of soft rules.

Here's how it works

• Get the free beaTunes trial version for Windows or Mac and install it on your computer
• Start beaTunes
• Analyze your library for beats per minute (BPM), color and language
  (the more information about each song is available, the better the matchlist)
• Select a couple of songs that you would like the matchlist to sound like - these are your seed songs
• Now click on the New Matchlist button in the toolbar
• beaTunes will display the matchlist dialog:
  
  
  
  
• Choose the source of the songs for your new matchlist
• beaTunes awards a match quality percentage for each song from your source - choose how well songs have to match the seed songs to make it into the list
• Usually it is a good idea to limit the number of songs you would like to add to the new playlist
• After you clicked OK, beaTunes creates the new list and saves it in beaTunes and iTunes

You are done. Enjoy your new matchlist!

Matchlists aren't always perfect - but usually a lot better than shuffle or some obscure 'smart' playlists. And if you don't like the outcome right away, you can easly custom tune the mechanism for creating matchlists. In the application preferences you can assign more or less weight to the rules that detect a similar BPM, a similar color or other attributes of your songs.

So - how are you going to create your next playlist? Get the free trial version and see for yourself how simple it can be.

More

beaTunes has a lot more useful features to identify tracks, keep your library in shape, blog about music, analyze your music and help you to create interesting playlists.