Intelligent iTunes Playlist Creator
Have you ever wanted an easy way to create an upbeat playlist for exercising or a softer, more relaxed one to fit your mood? If so, Tangerine! is your program of choice!
Tangerine!, published by Potion Factory, is an intelligent iTunes playlist creator. Tangerine! works by analyzing the BPM (beats per minute) and the beat intensity of your songs, allowing you to create a playlist with songs of similar tempos. Tangerine! integrates very well with iTunes, allowing you to load and save playlists, import album art, and exporting the BPM data to iTunes. It also automatically analyzes your new songs. While the program is very efficent at analyzing your music library, it currently can not analyze songs purchased from the iTunes store due to DRM, but they are working on a fix for this. Luckily, so is Apple!
Tangerine! also has a very nice and easy to use UI, as do most Potion Factory apps.
As you can see, Tangerine! looks a lot like iTunes, the left column contains your playlists and the right shows your songs along with their calculated BPM and beat intensity. The bottom screen shows the songs contained in your generated playlist with the album art stretched to show you how long the song is in comparison to the rest of the songs. Here you can delete or add songs and change the order. You can even listen to the songs right in the program and then save the playlist to iTunes.
In order to make a new playlist, you simply click the plus button next to “New Playlist” and a very helpful screen pops up.
As you can see here, you can adjust the duration of the playlist, the range of BPMs and beat intensities you want to include, as well as the generation pattern. You also have the option of adding higher rated songs more often and not allowing duplicate songs. If you find a setting you like, you can save it as a preset so you can generate another playlist in the future.
Overall, my impressions of Tangerine! are very good. I really like how easily it allows me to make playlists for my workouts and how I get a new and different playlist each time. I used to spend hours looking through my collection for new and different songs for my workout playlist but now it only takes seconds with my preset and allows me to easily have a new playlist each day. The only thing that is missing is the ability to analyze songs purchased from the iTunes store but according to the FAQ, a workaround is coming soon. Tangerine! is shareware and is available from Potion Factory for $24.95. A 15 day free trial is also available.
Wow thanks for this article Steve - I would never have known otherwise. Too bad about the DRM limitations.
@Fizzion: Yea, DRM is crap. Waiting for EMI’s DRM-free music.
I’ve tried this, and it’s great for workouts and running and all that - except for the fact it doesn’t work with songs from iTunes Store!
In general The Filter is a much better playlist creator.
@Robbie Leeds: Can The Filter deal with songs from the iTunes Store? I was under the impression that only iTunes can access the songs from the store.