BeaTunes for Mac

User Reviews

• Best tool I have found for tidying my music collection.

  aussiechrisFebruary 1, 2010

  Pros

  Tidy's up my music collection with little fuss. Super powerfull.

  Cons

  Can be slow to start up.

  Summary

  Best tool I have found for tidying up my music collection. Have use a couple of tools before, but this is the best. I love it!

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• Makes song data consistent. Adds BPM. Can be flaky.

  GlendaCJanuary 20, 2010

  Pros

  I really like using beaTunes to standardize information about my music. I appreciate the BPM, song color, and key signature information that is added. I enjoy being able to create playlists based on color. I LOVE the new lyric search feature!

  Cons

  It's often hard to get beaTunes to accept the solution I've chosen for each inconsistency presented to me, and it's frustrating to keep having to deal with the same issue over and over. The lyric search feature didn't find lyrics for my new songs.

  Summary

  I chose beaTunes for its BPM calculation feature and for its useful metadata features (standardization of song information, addition of information from online databases). It certainly lives up to my expectations in these two areas, and it adds other functionality (song color, key signature, lyric search) that I enjoy but don't require. Analyzing a large music library can take a very long time, and beaTunes often doesn't remember the solutions I've chosen to consistency issues it presents. For those reasons, and because it occasionally hangs, the program can be frustrating. But overall, I find that it meets my needs quite well.

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• works some of the time which is why i only rated it a 3

  girlylibrarianOctober 10, 2009

  Pros

  cleans up your music database well; especially with all the upgrades. that's great because i import a lot of free music and sometime i get duplicates which beatunes now will find & give you options for deleting that are more extensive than itunes

  Cons

  constantly freezes or doesn't save changes to itunes

  Summary

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• Great app but crashes alot.

  plankjrSeptember 22, 2009

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I thought my 7000+ song collection was well organized but after BeaTunes analyzed my music, I found out how wrong I was. BeaTunes saved me from a lot of painstaking, time consuming tag cleanup. It has been worth the money. However, the program either crashes or freezes almost every time I use it. I haven't lost anything so far and the program restarts where it left off. I still recommend it.

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• Much deeper than you think

  mac205March 13, 2007

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Beatunes is a monster. I would never point a bazooka at a mosquito and I would never run Beatunes on a couple dozen files and expect to learn anything. But boy howdy, if you need a bazooka to point at something... Beatunes requires a substantial investment in processor time before you'll really get any benefit out of it. It's got to span your music library, process all of your music and build its own database. I've got 80-some gigs of music (and the CDs to prove it, officer!) and it took the better part of a week to crunch the library down. So what do you get once you're done? Well, I open up Beatunes, pick a song I like, open up the preferences to tweak "matchability" (Beatunes uses 11 different parameters to pick its matches, all of which are adjustable) and make a "matchlist" out of them. Then I close Beatunes and load the list on the iPod. I wouldn't have to - Beatunes lets you stream directly into iTunes if both applications are open. It's great if you need a new soundtrack for running, for working out in the gym, for going with the romantic dinner at home, for finding angry music to write poetry to, whatever. Again, if your library is small and you've got every song you own at the tip of your brain, you might not get much utility out of it. But if, like me, you're sitting on top of a thousand albums going back twenty years, Beatunes will give you an awesome slice through them. Beatunes is also handy for people who rip their own libraries or subscribe to eMusic or buy a bunch of Russian MP3s on a regular basis: the file maintenance that Beatunes performs is pretty handy. It finds similar (but not identical) names, genres, song titles, whatever, and gives you an easy way to merge them. Shorter version: If you're using iTunes enough that you wish there were more, better ways to interact with it, Beatunes is a great investment. If you want to be reminded of all the cool music you already own, Beatunes is a great investment. If you're used to doing your file fixes in iTunes with a bunch of haxie Applescripts, Beatunes is a great investment.

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• Gives Incorrect BPM

  jedix878xJanuary 29, 2007

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I've downloaded the trial version before deciding if I wanted to buy this. But I've decided not to because this application thinks all of my songs are 70BPM. I've tried Fast to Precise settings and none of them gave the correct BPM. I've compared to a manual BPM counter. This application is a disappointment~

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• Pretty Neat But Can't Analyze Protected Tracks

  hadrianwOctober 24, 2006

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />First off I was pleasantly surprised with how fast the program worked. I have over 20,000 tracks and I thought it would take a week or more to analyze the song based on others comments and the estimate give by beaTunes itself. It actually took about 3 days to amalyze 15,000 tracks (on intel 2.0ghz iMac with 2 GB ram). The ability to determine BPM and Color of song is very handy. The ability to identify potential problems with the tags of tracks for names spelled wrong, artists being in more than one genre, etc. The most frustrating thing about the program though was that it cannot analyze songs I bought or downloaded (like the free downloads of the week, discovery download etc) on iTunes because they have copy protection. I know this is more likely due to Apple than to beaTunes but it still was frustrating because about 5,000 of those 20,000 tracks fit this category. Still discovering other uses and features of the program. All in all a stellar effort despite the speed, and copy protection limitations.

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• First go through hell, then go through heaven..

  Stine ©August 14, 2006

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />The problem with _trying_ software like this, is the initial disappointment. The idea of having an intelligent analysis of your music is ofcourse wonderful, but OMG it takes days to investigate an average music library. Therefore, there's NO FUN unless you let it take over your processor(s) for a very long time first. So that's the only (yet a very important) drawback of beaTunes. Do not use, while running P2P software, other Java apps, a processor intensive browser (like IE or FF), do NOT switch between apps (beaTunes HATES that), do not run Photoshop, games, iChat... it simply slows everything down infinately, sometimes resulting in minutes and minutes of 'busy cursors'. Patience. Days long. AFTER that, life gets more beautiful.The ability to sort music by color, key, BPM, tags - it's all there. Much like Audioscrobbler, MusicIP and services like that - you feel like you have full control over your collection. Much so improving your listening experience, musical preferences and iPod habits. In the end, it's worth it. And the price is OK, support is provided, there's a very comprehensive website, and so forth. But it you're into instant gratification, skip this.

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• I'm Impressed

  VersionTrackerUserOpinionAugust 3, 2006

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I was skeptical about this app since it is Java and I couldn't imagine it would actually do what it said it would. I was wrong. It is one of the most usable Java apps I've seen. And it actually works--it does figure out what songs are similar to other songs. It really only has two problems which the developers can't do much about. (1) It can't analyze music with DRM so none of my ITMS purchases get analyzed. Only Apple could solve this problem. (2) It's slow when analyzing a large library (and I know people with much larger libraries than mine). I'm running it on a MacBook Pro 1.83GHz dual core and it looks like its going to take a few days to analyze my 40GB library. I left it running over night--about 8 hours--and it got through about 10GB. The results are worth it to me so I'll just let it keep on analyzing.

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• Greatapp

  jgcpedsJuly 23, 2006

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I really like this program because it can choose songs for a matchlist (beaTunes uses it synonymously with playlist) that I can use for working out, or whatever mood I'm in. It is the only program of it's kind that I know of that will analyze music in Apple Lossless format. Good price, too.

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