Confused about BPM.
I have just gone through a very long process of analyzing quite a few songs so I could see their BPMs. If I look at the BPM rating of each song...I am a bit surprised of what I am seeing. I have some songs with very high BPM that seem slow and plodding. How should I be reading this? Is there a relationship between Intensity and BPM?
I thought this would be great for compiling a great mix of dance tracks, but when I get a Celine Dion song (The Power of Love) near the top of my BPMs tracks, I begin to scratch my head.
Thanks for helping me see the light on this issue.
Redbike:confused:
# 1 Re: Confused about BPM.
It's an inexact science...I've played around with BPM's/intensity, and haven't yet figured out the best way to use it--it's not tight enough to go across all genres; I think it will probably work in a smartlist combining intensity, BPM and genre though--again, I have to work with it more. One thing you can do though is manually change the BPM's or Intensity, if you don't like the assigned values on an occasional reading that makes no sense.
dmt1 at 2007-11-15 17:20:29 >
# 2 Re: Confused about BPM.
I'm not sure the BPM features works quite as well as it should.
I was looking through my "duplicates" list ; I have quite few duplicate tracks, usually where they appear on an album proper and then a subsequent compilation.
For about 20% of these duplicates, I have wildly disparate BPM and Intensity values despite the fact that the tracks are the same (same duration ; sound the same to the ear). The only thing I could think that might be different is the "volume" of the track but I'm not sure why this would effect BPM values.
BobU at 2007-11-15 17:21:29 >
# 4 Re: Confused about BPM.
Yes both encoded the same -- VBR with the alt preset standard option. The tracks with different BPMs have different values for the bitrate field.
I've just had another check and it's not 20% of my duplicates but about 5 (pairs of) tracks...as I said before, both with identical playing times and sounding the same to me.
BobU at 2007-11-15 17:23:28 >
# 5 Re: Confused about BPM.
Yeah, that's truly odd...I wonder if different builds of MC9 are measuring BPM's differently; maybe Jriver is tweaking these things here and there...If you've analyzed audio or encoded with the same build of MC9 though, that would shoot that scenerio all to 'ell...
dmt1 at 2007-11-15 17:24:27 >
# 6 Re: Confused about BPM.
BPM seems to be an inaccurate science at best,
Seems it's down to how the beat 'sounds' to the analyzing software, I find it works best on dance music with a definitive bass/beat, stuff like breakbeat/jungle/jazz you can forget it, it goes all over the shop.
But I don't think it's Jrivers fault...
Watching the spectrum analyzer while the track is playing shows the tracks 'beat' not being much higher on the graph than all the other instruments, so I guess the analyzer(s) has/have trouble differentiating what is the 'beat' & what's the 'other' instruments on some tracks...
I use tracktor & atomixmp3 for mixing and they do the exact same, some tracks just throw them a wobbler & they report some crazy BPM value...
Put it this way, I've even had spoken word stuff, Chomsky etc come out with like 85bpm - Go MC Noam on the m-i-c!!!
