Harmonic Mixing

Have you ever wondered why certain songs just don't match, even though their beats perfectly align?

Often this is the case, because they are in a different tonal key. Songs in incompatible keys simply sound dissonant when mixed together.

To mix your songs harmonically, you will first have to figure out, what key they are in. And if you're a good musician, you might be able to do so, by listening and playing chords on your piano. Most likely though, you are much better off letting beaTunes determine the keys of your songs automatically.

Once you have determined the key of songs in your library, you can build playlists based on the keys (and other properties) of your tracks. The Open Key Notation will help you find matching songs, even if you're not a professional musician.

Here's how it works

• Get the free beaTunes trial version for Windows or Mac and install it on your computer
• Start beaTunes
• When asked whether you want to analyze the whole library, click No
• If you want other programs to be able to read the key, open the beaTunes general preferences and make sure that non-iTunes fields are embedded
• Select the songs you want to process and click on Analyze
• beaTunes will now show you the analysis options dialog:

• Choose Analyze key, select whether you want to replace already existing key values (probably not) - then start the analysis
  (you might also want to check the Estimate BPM checkbox while you are at it - it will help you with beatmixing)
• The songs are now analyzed in the background
• To track progress, click on the Task Queue item in the left part of the main window:

• The progress bar in the first row shows how much of the analysis of this song is completed
• When the analysis is running, the Pause Analysis button is enabled allowing you to pause analysis at any time
• The estimated remaining analysis time is displayed in the status bar
• Key analysis is a one time effort that takes some time - we recommend to run it over night
• Note, that when you shut down beaTunes and restart it, it resumes analysis where you stopped it

Pretty easy. Now would you like to analyze your music collection? Get the free trial version.

More

beaTunes has a lot more useful features to analyze your music adjust loudness via ReplayGain, keep your library in shape, analyze your music and help you to create interesting playlists.