beaTunes 3.0.2: Some significant improvements. Do they make it the best beaTunes yet?
Digital music files – faceless 1s and 0s in a computer. Every since digital DJing exploded back in the mid 2000s, getting to grips with digital music has been an obsession among DJs.
Great though programs like iTunes are, everything can get messy, quickly. Plus, DJs have special music programming needs that it’s hopeless to rely on consumer software to address. Enter specialist music programs like beaTunes. Here we review beaTunes 3, the latest version of this specialised software.
What kind of journey do you want to go on?
Imagine you’ve got a high-mileage old sports car, needing some attention, and you need to go on a long journey in it. You take it to your local garage and say “just make it work”, then you buy a GPS to tell you your route. The car comes back, working, and the GPS lets you drive there safely. The question is this: Did you really get the best from the car or your journey?
What you’ve just done is the equivalent of running your valuable but hopelessly messed up iTunes collection through an automatic library cleaning service like TuneUp, then hitting Genius in iTunes to get a playlist for your next party. It all works, but wouldn’t you like a bit more control to get that gorgeous old car singing, and to enjoy your trip to the max?
It all works, but wouldn’t you like a bit more control to get that gorgeous old car singing, and to enjoy your trip to the max?
OK, now imagine the same journey in the same car, but instead of giving it to the garage, you take it to a specialist restorer and engine tuner. They get it working better than new, and explain to you all of its features, foibles and little tricks of the trade. Suitably armed, you get online and research the route for your trip, sharing recommendations and getting “insider secrets” for every step of your route, fine-tuning it to suit exactly what you imagine your trip should be like. How much do you think you’ll enjoy this trip?
What you’ve just done is the equivalent of using beaTunes 3 on your music collection. Want to get your digital library properly shipshape? Add important information like musical feel and key? Need help in making intelligent, eye-opening playlists for your DJ sets that are “just right” for any occasion? Then you may be interested in what beaTunes 3 has to offer.
beaTunes 2.1 review
We reviewed beaTunes 2.1 a while back, and if you want you can read our full review of Beatunes 2.1 as much is the same, but we’ll recap in brief here anyway.
beaTunes does three things for you: It inspects your music for issues, it analyses it to add extra, useful information, and it then lets you create playlists from that information. Let’s look at each stage of the process:
Inspection
The software will do all kinds of checks for you within your music collection – silly stuff it would take you ages to sort out otherwise. It can identify duplicates, find compilations where there’s only one artist (ie they’re not really compilations), find similar songs with different ratings, identify albums whose tracks have different years, highlight rarely used genres so you can retag those tracks with broader ones, pick up on spelling and capitalisation issues, and several other things.
Inspecting tunes in beaTunes: here I'm renaming genres. It's up to you how you act on what beaTunes flags up.
It works well except for a bug in the rarely-used languages field, where it told me I had a tune in another language other than English but wouldn’t let me change the tag.
(As I didn’t even know there was a language tag in MP3s, I won’t be losing any sleep over this.)
It has a built-in ID3 tag editor too for manual tweaks – but I would prefer to have seen this a bit more fully featured, as it could then replace my ID3 tag editor entirely (I’m taking about version 1/version 2 ID3 tag inspection and mass operations like transferring a value from one field to another, plus there’s no album art handling).
Overall, this area has improved a lot since the last version.
Analysis
Here the software will add extra info – BPM, musical key (new in this version is an equivalent of the Camelot system, like Mixed in Key uses), and so on. It can query a database of song titles and artists, and calculate BPM and also add “colour” (a measure of “mood” – songs in similar “colours” sound good together).
Get some colour into your music and improve your playlists with beaTunes and its mood system.
It now has “replay gain” (similar to MP3Gain) which corrects overall volume of your MP3s without degrading their sound quality, and much of this information can be embedded right in the MP3s themselves.
This brings me on to the absolute killer change in beaTunes 3 that will open the software up to a whole group of new potential users – unlike before, it doesn’t need iTunes to work. In fact, you can point the software at any directory of music and it’ll work just fine. So if you hate iTunes, but want all of these features, you’re solidly in luck.
The makers are proud of the accuracy of their key mixing software, and while all key detection algorithms get things wrong sometimes, this one is definitely a good performer. Without doing our own exhaustive tests, we ain’t going to say one is better than any of the others though!
Making playlists
So once your songs are all analysed and cleaned up, it’s time to plan your journey, so to speak. beaTunes is really good here, as this is its main purpose in life – to help you to construct great playlists. Once you’ve got them, you can use them as the basis for DJ sets, new mixtapes, or just to listen to for ideas.
You can pick one or more “seed tracks” and then hit “new matchlist”. The software then gives you several options, the main ones being overall match quality (high = less chance of a mix, low means more chance) and number of tunes (you can limit it to size, time or even MBs).
Making a 'matchlist' - you can fine tune how it goes about creating your playlist for you in this window.
It lets you set dozens of further parameters, too. For instance, you can specify how important BPMs are to you – maybe very important for dance mix, but not so for a bar set. You can add all types of filters – specifying year, genre, whatever. Be aware though that you’ll need a big collection to get really specific and expect it to sort you out an intelligent playlist.
You may be wondering how the colour system works. Basically it analyses the sonic characteristics of tunes to find those that should just work well together. It’s not an exact science but it’s a good starting point for further manual tuning.
You can use different rulesets too (matching BPM and colour, just BPM, just colour, similar year and genre, or the default mix of everything), and you can even filter by the same or related keys – great for planning harmonic mixes.
I’d like to have seen the ability to restrict the number of times an individual artist could appear in a mix, but apart from that I think they’ve covered all bases.
It’s true to say that this element of beaTunes 3 works best with a large collection, but many of its functions will be useful to you even if your collection is only a few hundred tunes.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for one single program to accompany your music collection and help you sort out inconsistencies, get everything sounding great, help you plan your playlists, and keep your MP3 tags all updated, beaTunes isn’t fully that program quite yet.
beaTunes is now getting pretty close to being the tool for the DJ with a large music collection…
Even with beaTunes doing what it does, you’ll still want some way of updating and editing cover art, the ability to mess with your tunes sonically, and even maybe a Traktor companion to help you with that software’s somewhat primitive file-handling system: step forward TuneUp (or iTunes itself), Platinum Notes and Trainspotter respectively.
But with the ability to work away from iTunes for the first time, the addition of “replay gain” to balance your volumes, and clearer/better key detection, beaTunes is now getting pretty close to being the tool for the DJ with a large music collection who wants to get the best from it. It’s worthy of your serious consideration, and you can try a demo from the site to see if it’s for you.
Summary
We like:
- Essential, intelligent library maintenance
- Ability to work away from iTunes
- Unlocks the depths of your collection
- Far superior to iTunes Genius for set suggestions
We don’t like:
- Need a large collection to really make the most of it
- No album artwork feature (not even ID3 editing)
- Can take time to do its initial analysis
Star ratings:
|
Features: |
|
|
Ease of use: |
|
|
Value: |
|
|
OVERALL: |
Product details:
Price: US$31.95 (new) / US$24.95 (upgrade 1 to 3) / US$11.95 (upgrade 2 to 3).
Buy from: beaTunes website
What do you think?
Do you use anything special to help you to plan your DJ sets? Are you a beaTunes user who finds it indispensable? Or do you use something else to plan your sets? Please let us know in the comments.
Now go to:
What Extra Software Do I Need For Digital DJing?
beaTunes 2.1 Review: The DJ’s Essential iTunes Companion?
TuneUp Review: Can This Software Fix Your iTunes Library?
Want to escape the bedroom and play in public - fast?
Our 1000s-selling How To Digital DJ Fast video course shows you how.
Learn to DJ Free - email course plus bonus PDF book
Sign up for our weekly email course for beginners now...
Trouble choosing a controller? Visit the web's #1 guide!
DJ Controllers: The Ultimate Buyer’s Guide 2013.
Tags: beatunes 3, playlists
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Just when I thought I had got my Digital tunes cleanup-and-get-ready-for-playing-out sequence down to a manageable process, a new version comes out.
I suppose I’ll be downloading the trial then… I never could get the playlist (genius) thing to work very well on the old one. Maybe I wasn’t pointing it to enough tunes.
[ link ]Never got to fully take advantage of the colour coding system when I downloaded the trial a while back, but I will say that it took FOREVER to analyze all of the tracks and the bpms were usually pretty off… Maybe that was only my experience with it. *shrug*
[ link ]So does it integrate with Traktor? i.e. if I make a fabby mood playlist in beaTunes can I import it into Traktor?
[ link ]No, you cant import your playlist from beatunes to traktor and i cant find a way to convert beatunes .m3u8 or xmpf to traktors m3u,nml or .nmx
[ link ]Hi there,
you should actually be able to drag and drop songs from any beaTunes playlist into Traktor. Due to a bug in 3.0.2, playlists themselves are not draggable, however this bug will be fixed in 3.0.3 (out soon).
Regarding playlist formats: beaTunes 3 currently supports m3u8 and xmpf, both fairly open standards.
m3u8 is really just the UTF-8 version of the regular m3u standard. That is – it can deal with fancy characters like simplified Chinese or the like – something the original m3u fails to do correctly. If all your filenames and other information exported in m3u8 is actually ASCII, you can simply rename the exported playlist to m3u and you’re good to go.
nml and nmx are both proprietary formats that are AFAIK undocumented. That said, I’m talking to some people at Traktor, hoping that they will provide documentation so that beaTunes can also export their particular formats.
Additionally, you can easily implement your own playlist exporter. Just take a look at http://www.beatunes.com/beatlet-playlistexporter.html
-hendrik
[ link ](author of beaTunes)
I picked up a free MP3 tagger called JJ MP3 Renamer which can handle the little things this misses (album art, filenames, etc). If it works well I’ll give it a serious look.
[ link ]This article is greatly timed for me as I’m in the process of organising 3000 odd tunes into a coherant library and despise iTunes.
Has anyone here tried MusicBrainz Picard? Seems a good option for correcting the ID3 tags on a more automated way.
[ link ]Working on a PC platform I think Mediamonkey works a treat for sorting & tagging your music. You can drag from a created playlist etc directly into traktor.
On down side is not being able to import or sync you Traktor playlist
[ link ]I have come to trust Virtual dj’s Key detection system and have permanently tagged all my collection with VDJs algorithm rather then MIK.
[ link ]Can the key detection in this software be turned off?
Yes, it’s completely configurable.
[ link ]Cheers Phil, i’ll go check it out!
[ link ]One thing I hate is when I have tracks with the wrong genre.
I’ve used The Godfather a music manager software to edit my id3 tags.
It’s free and it works. I believe it’s only for pc. I’m not a mac guy but there should be free music manager software macs.
http://www.jtclipper.eu/thegodfather/
Miguel
[ link ]Ok, I tried the trial of the software. PRETTY SLICK! however, BPM ain’t as accurate as it could be. For example, there are some tracks I have beating at 120 BPM, and it’s registering it at 60, 65 BPM. Other Software products (Tracktor, Itch, Virtual DJ, Denon Music Manager) seems to be picking the BPM up accurately.
I tried also building a quick mix from the key, and I must say, this may be changing the way I play music here in the future! A must buy for me!
[ link ]
you do realize that the registration of 60-65 is simply half of 120-130, right? I mean while it may not give you the BPM doubled, it’s still pretty accurate. I dunno the nuances of this but it should give you range options, as VDJ does, with reading BPMs… that would save on you having to go back and doubling or halving the BPM readout.. is that step there Phil?
[ link ]Hi,
before analysis, beaTunes allows you to pick a BPM range like 70-140. That’s also the recommended approach.
-hendrik
[ link ](author of beaTunes)
Yes, DUHHH, I realize that.
LOL!
But if three other products are picking up the tune at ‘the perceived correct’ BPM and one product isn’t, who is it to say it is correct. What I’ve done is played with the range of accuracy and it seems to fall in line with every other product.
[ link ]@hindrick
By Trade I manage a group of Database Engineers and I have set a standard (Don’t EVER use Automatic in any configuration). And I did in this one, since the ranges were not outside of the one’s in my other software set, I chose automatic.
SOOO..
Can you add an option to put your own set of ranges in?
I use Denon products (DN-S3700′s and the Xone:DX as my ‘CONTROL CENTER’). I’m a mac user and the problem I have is that the Denon Music Manager ‘ain’t the best thang smoking’ as I use it on my PC to make playlists. Well, in Denon’s case, it’s BPM detection, when it updates the files, it uses a straight character string, from what I see. When I open it in Music Picard (on mac) or MP3 tagger (on the PC) it picks it up as a string..
I believe when Beatport picks it up, it picks it up as an unsigned small integer and converts it….How tough would it be to build a routine that corrects that?
ALSO, the delete option is kinda strange…I’d like to NOT delete anything from my library and remove it from beatport. I hit delete yesterday and removed A LOT of stuff that I have taken the time to sort out. The ONE thing I like about iTunes is that it does allow you choice of deleting files.
Something to think about….If you need a beta tester, I’ll be glad to help!
[ link ]1) beatport bpm problem: it should be easy for them to fix this. The id3 spec is quite clear that the BPM value should be an integer written as a string.
2) delete option: I’m not quite sure which program’s delete option you are referring to. beaTunes’?
[ link ]@hendrik
in Beatunes if I choose to delete a song, I delete the song, I only want to delete the song from the list. I want to keep the song, but removed that song from that list.
iTunes does not necessarily delete the song it asks if you would like to keep the actual file. i.e. I clear it from my XML. Not saying iTunes is cool, I just want to keep my song!
Also, while VERY intuitive, If under library tab on the side, I can get some file management. I manage my own music library Vs. letting iTunes do it for me. a little better file management would make it complete for (at least for me)..
[ link ]@BigMixxx
Are you using an iTunes-based library or a directory based library in beaTunes?
[ link ]Directory based, I don’t like the way iTunes manages music.
(Mind you, I am a Database guy by trade, Certified with several databases– and can use the products I’m certified in not just pass a test. So if I say I don’t like the way iTunes manages music, it’s a real problem to me)
[ link ]@BigMixxx
Well, in either case, beaTunes should only delete the file (actually, move to trash/recycling bin) when you delete it from the “Library”.
Deleting a a track from a regular playlist on the other hand should never delete the actual file.
If you find that beaTunes behaves differently, please start a discussion in the beaTunes support forum at http://help.beatunes.com/
Thanks.
BTW: I understand not liking iTunes – it seems that people either love it or hate it – there isn’t much in between.
[ link ]That said, iTunes also lets you manage the location of your files. Just go to Preferences -> Advanced and uncheck both “Keep iTunes Media folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”. To avoid issues, you must uncheck both checkboxes *before* adding any songs to an iTunes library.
Perhaps this is helpful to someone.
Hi@all
[ link ]I’m using BeaTunes since now more then one year (started with version 2.1.19 and updatet shortly to Version 3.1) and for me this is one of the best softwaretools i have found for DJing. My collection of soundfiles is around 3000 files and if i do not put my sets together with beatunes, i’m ending up playing the same tunes all the time. beatunes helped me to find nice tunes from me collection i never played before. Sure there are some small disadvantage such as the bpm callculation, but i never used it, to get the best result on bpm i use mixmeister bpm callculation. also it takes days to analyse a hugh collection, but you have to do it only once…
Maybe some of you will now say that putting together a playlist/DJSet with the help of beatunes isn’t proper djing, fine for me, i will keep on using it because it helps me a lot finding the right tunes and playing as many as possible different tunes from my collection, and the software saves me a lot of time…
i would say that beatunes is at least worth a try or even a must have…
Cheers from Switzerland
Just to let you all know, that the Language bug mentioned in the article under Inspection should be fixed by now (beaTunes 3.0.3).
[ link ]you cant playback songs in it! it needs a separate program for it!!!
[ link ]Yes, it’s not meant to be a media player. We’re saying it no longer needs the iTunes library, you can use it in file directories so therefore it is now more than an iTunes-only add-on.
[ link ]Hello there,
[ link ]Does anyone know if there exists a comparison between softwares doing the same thing as Beatunes 3 concerning analysis on a mac computer (key and BPM detection and writing, with the ability to have the Camelot wheel presentation for the key) ?
I am saying that because I currently use Rapid Evolution Beta 3 for mac and I have no idea of its performance relative to, say, mixed in key, mixmeister, beatunes (lates version) or others.
Thanks