I was trying to sort out a playlist on the iPod that would be suitable for a long (couple of hours) fast, walk. Heart pounding stuff for uphill or down, mindfull that music with at least 100 beats / minute was best for a variety of physical pursuits, including keeping time while administering CPR.
I Googled around a bit and found that Amarok had a "BPM" column, so using "sudo apt-get install amarok" in a terminal, I installed Amarok on my Ubuntu 8.10 Linux laptop system and found......that it was just a column. It wouldn't calculate the BPM's for me. I would have to sort that out myself. Ta.
Back to Google. Located "bpm calc 4 amarok". It's a script that drives 'soundstretch' to work out the BPM for songs for use in Amarok. It adds the info directly to the music database! Great! Sounds like what I need.
I installed "bpm calc 4 amarok" and found that the author only supports MySQL databases, not the SQLite database Amarok uses by default. Well, I'm not adding the complexity of MySQL setup, admin and network access to my chosen problem. Not yet anyway. Maybe another day.I reviewed options and chose another path. Maybe Windows.
Pistonsoft's "BPM Detector" looked promising and it's free. I downloaded it and was going to boot to Windows Vista, but instead decided to install the "WINE" support for running Windows apps on Linux. I had recently been very happy with DosBox on Linux for running my old DOS games, so maybe WINE was as good as that by now.
The result was that both the installer and the app itself work well with WINE.
In \home\steve\desktop, I ran "wine BMPdetector_setup.exe" and followed the installer prompts. I de-selected adding icons or things to the taskbar. Not necessary without a real Windows desktop UI and an unnecessary potential source of error for the install.
Then, to actually run the installed program, I entered:
wine "C:\\Program Files\\Pistonsoft BPM Detector\\bpmdetector.exe"
...and the app runs and gives me BPM values for each song. That done, I created a shortcut / launcher on the desktop so all I have to do now is click on an icon to start BPM Detector. I don't appear to be able "Select All" in a list and batch the BPM caculations, but it works fine if I click on each song one at a time. It can play the songs, too. No problems. Now at least I can get the BPM value for a given song and manually enter it into Amarok. Overall, the MySQL solution and "bpm calc 4 amarok" would have been better and faster if I had MySQL already running and knew more about how to drive it. That "if" was too big for me today. This alternative will get the job done, too.....
Here's a screen shot. Click on it to see a larger version.
By the looks of it you've had more luck with WINE than I ever have. It seems to complain for me whenever I try and install something that spans across multiple CDs.
ReplyDeleteIlluminatedtiger: The app I'm writing about is small and simple. :-) Those tend to work very well with WINE unless they want to touch hardware in some way or are buggy.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! Thanks! I was trying to use BeatScanner with Wine with no luck to put together a good work out mix, this software works very well under Wine! Thanks for the review!
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