It’s not everyday that I see a music application that, not only works well with iTunes, but makes your music life easier and fun. Potion Factory is one of the many small developers out there creating music and sound applications that work with the iLife suite of Apple apps. So far, they have two established applications under their belt. They’re working on their third one called Tangerine. What a nice, calm name for a program! Tangerine does one thing for you: helps you create playlists in iTunes where selections are based on beats-per-minute and the intensity of those beats.

There have been one or two apps I’ve seen on Versiontracker that were built for this purpose as well. These kind of applications have to first analyze your music collection. I tried out one of these (I can’t remember the name) and it took the program several hours to analyze my library of, then, 1500 songs. It didn’t even get close to finishing during that time, causing me to quit it and never open the app again!

I downloaded Tangerine, opened it and it didn’t waste any time analyzing my music library, which now is over 2000 songs. I dreaded the wait time on this one but, fortunately, the estimated time turned out to be an hour. So I did some things around the house, came back to it, and it was done in about 45 minutes. Much better analysis time! Now to see just what this thing can do, I immediately selected the plus button to make a new playlist. A drop down menu appears with sliders to control the range of BPM’s and beat intensities you want the songs in the playlist to be around. You can also dictate the playlist duration and specific BPM patterns (there are four patterns available) you want the selections to be in. Other options include controlling the frequency of rated songs and duplicate track removal. In the menubar, there’s even an option to save the BPM’s into each track’s metadata (this may take as long as the initial analysis, due to encoding.)
After hitting create, it gave me a playlist that exceeded my expectations, considering that not many programs can accurately measure BPM or beat strength. If you click on the post’s picture, you’ll see my fourth playlist run-through. Tangerine’s preferences are simple, with a pane to set up exclusion rules for kinds of tracks you don’t want added. The pane works similar to iTunes’ Smart Playlist editing. The developer even included a default rule set that works well for most trial runs. If you’re not quite satistfied with the order of the tracks, you can simply click-and-drag the boxes that represent the songs to wherever you want them. Even though you can save newly-created playlist to iTunes, you don’t have to resort to flipping back to iTunes to play it. Tangerine’s standalone audio capabilities perform the job admirably.

My music collection, small by most audiophile’s standards, runs the gamut from classical and new age to rock and metal to industrial, eurodance and techno. I’ve found through experimentation that lower beat intensities will usually procure music along the lines of rock and metal. Higher beat strengths yield more “danceable” music. One playlist made with higher beat strengths gave me a good dance mix with a little electronica thrown in for variety. Much less work than creating a Smart Playlist in iTunes and utilizing Party Shuffle, then having to re-order the tracks for consistency from one song to the next.

Potion Factory has done a great job with this app, even with it still in beta status. However, there are some bugs to work out. After making my first playlist, the “+” button (Make new playlist) wouldn’t work. I shut down the app, restarted, and everything was fine. The problem hasn’t repeated itself with other lists, but it’s worth mentioning. Also, sometimes the artwork only shows up half-and-half, as if the app had trouble generating it all the way from the top of the image to the bottom. The BPM analysis, while being good, can still use some refinement. Somehow, I don’t think Fear Factory’s “Machines of Hate” is a mere 124 BPM’s (more like 180!). Maybe the way the song starts out threw Tangerine for a loop. There is a column for song ratings, but it doesn’t seem to let you rate songs independently of iTunes. Click-dragging the song order on the graphical list works and is reflected on playback, but the song order in the list view stays the same… and you can’t reorder the tracks in the list view. One more thing… there doesn’t seem to be a way to make a playlist based upon the Smart Playlists that are displayed. Making a playlist after selecting a Smart Playlist only results in tracks from the main library. This is, I think, the only really bad omission.

Other than the bugs mentioned, Tangerine is shaping up to be a worthy iTunes companion and a fine addition to any Mac users Application folder. It has some awesome features, but I could suggest a few more. A built-in EQ would be nice. Also, while the BPM pattern generator’s four presets are good for most users, some may want more variety to choose from. Maybe even an option inside the drop-down pane to customize a pattern. However, I can work around these small details. This is an application I’m going to enjoy playing around with and it will make my listening hours more pleasureable!

(Kudos to Sebastian of Void Inside for the heads-up!)

Tags: Tangerine, iTunes, Potion Factory, Playlists, Music Apps

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Apple Stuff, Music, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.