Intro to BPM

So for my first real post I am not going to even recommend a song I am going to tell you how to figure out the BPM of your music library. You probably have songs that are the right BPM that you love already. What you need to do is figure out the BPM of all your songs.

I did this using MixMeister BPM Analyzer, which you can download here. Don't forget to unselect the "Would you like to hear about..." check box, if you don't want to get spammed.

They have a Mac and PC version. I am assuming you Linux guys will know how to find a BPM analyzer all by yourselves.

Unzip the downloaded file and run the .exe file, which will install MixMeister on your machine and launch the programme. You can add your music by clicking on the first little folder icon on the top bar and choosing a folder to be searched for music. So add either just an album or your whole music folder.

MixMeister calculates the BPM and writes it to the files ID3 tags, which can be read by other music programmes like iTunes. Note : MixMeister works with mp3s. If you have your music in another format and want to convert it, you can use iTunes and follow the instructions on this page.

That was quite a bit of work, and depending on how much music you have probably took a while. So now have a look, do you have any 180BPM songs? The chances are you don't! A lot of music, maybe even most depending on your taste falls into the danceable 100-130BPM range. The good news is that songs with a BPM of 90 work just as well. 90 is half of 180, and in fact I can't figure out the difference in sound from 90 to 180BPM. So hopefully you do have a few songs at 90BPM, you can also try 89 or 91. It doesn't have to be super precise.

Happy Running!