If you’re one of the DJs, fitness instructors or beat-oriented enthusiasts out there who just want a quick and simple way to find a song’s BPM (beats per minute) without having to faff around with a whole load of complicated, external software, then rejoice as your prayers have been answered by none other than BeatGauge (1.0.3) the new beat-tracking software app for Macs by Tagtraum Industries inc.
BeatGauge automatically calculates the BPM of your songs when you drag and drop them from your iTunes library into the app, reporting the results back to iTunes. It’s a fast, multi-threaded, professional grade app and the ideal tool to help you pick out songs for DJing, spinning classes, aerobics, running or anything else that you’d like to do, set to a beat.
The set-up is relatively easy: after downloading you simply have to launch the app which is presented in a small window. With iTunes open, you can just drag songs as well as entire playlists from your library over to BeatGauge and, after a few seconds, the BPM of those songs is calculated. iTunes wont show the BPM sort column automatically so you first have to enable it by right-clicking on the column-type row and ticking “BPM”. Once it’s there, the tempo of your songs are displayed.
Some things to note when considering purchasing this app is that it’s for Macs only (sorry PC users) and requires OS X (Yosemite) 10.10 so if you haven’t uploaded the new version yet, you can’t use it. Other points to bear in mind when using BeatGauge is that the music files must be locally stored in iTunes and be writable, iCloud songs must be downloaded before analysis, DRM protected songs cannot be analysed and sometimes the BPM detection is not always 100% accurate, so allow for a small margin of error.
At $7.99, it’s not the cheapest option out there but the simple and intuitive interface makes it an easy option to quickly calculate a whole playlist’s BPM if you’re willing to splurge for it. For all the PC users out there you may want to consider looking at Mixmeister – a similar tool that’s windows compatible with the added bonus of being slightly cheaper.
