BPM - Beats per minute - for workout playlists

Would this be useful for anyone else?

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Great minds think alike - I was just thinking about this thie evening. I also use JRiver Media Centre and have all my tracks tagged with BPM, but having the values in Roon as well would be useful for playlists.

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+100. I was thinking this exact thing! I use the BPM tag for workouts, mellow, etc. Though not perfect it works well enough for me in JRiver Media Center.

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Plus a modest +1 :wink:

+1 for BPM detection request

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Yes good idea

+1 as well. Not just for workouts, but general moods / atmosphere it would be helpful as a “focus” criteria.

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A similarly edge-case situation:

A friend of mine is a musician, and when he rehearses I has a program that plays music at an adjustable speed, without changing the tone (frequency). He has this on the computer that has the DAC for the speakers. But it’s a Windows program, and now that he installed ROCK he can’t play that anymore.

Basically the same as BPM adjustment.
So I’m not talking about tagging the content with BPM, im talking about adjusting.
Makes it more interesting for the programmers :grinning: .

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BPM most Definitely wanted!

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+1 for Roon in my gym.

Yes, please!

+1

Is the data out there, or would it require Roon’s own analysis?

Wanted here too! I cant even see BPM metadata in Roon when it is already present in the file’s metadata. Can we have the field at least? Shouldn’t be too hard :slight_smile:

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Depends. There is a BPM tag already commonly used for the ID3 tag format. However, I expect many (non-DJ-oriented) web shops don’t include that tag in their downloads. And it isn’t necessarily always correct even when it is there. (Especially when you have a BPM shift during the duration of the song.) While Roon might use the BPM tag as a hint, I think it would probably be best off if i did its own BPM detection (including breaking that into start and end BPM) as another component of the track analysis they already do.

Track key detection is a similar tag, and even more unlikely to be there except for DJ-oriented downloads.

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… but at the very least we’d like to have this metadata presented in the GUI even if filled manually.

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I would like this as well

My interest in this feature was piqued again by my purchase of swimming earphones (the prices are reasonable these days). There are a handful of apps that analyze your files for you, but the consensus about them is that they are prone to error (20-30% error rates are commonly reported). I assume Roon would face similar problems if it implemented this feature.

Nevertheless, the possibility is there, and it could be part of a wider, robust “smart playlist” generation feature. The web of connections between artists, tracks and albums that Roon curates could be exploited to automatically, and with some user-provided focus, generate coherent playlists. Roon Radio on steroids! Imagine what those algorithms could do if you just fed it more data, such as the key detection mentioned by @cwichura.

Oh yeah: if you’re interested, it looks like Foobar2000 has an extension that does bpm detection. Users are reporting a 10% error rate if certain filters are applied. That’s not too bad…

That’s what I want – Roon-ready swimming earphones!

You are probably best looking for DJ orientated apps, though as DJ player apps have become a lot better now then that tends to be built into them.

I used to use something called mixed-in-key that would analyse key and bpm and append that to file meta data back in my DJing days. The genre being analyser can make a huge difference - 4 to the floor is easy of course, but they can often struggle or get confused by break beats, D&B etc and pretty much forget anything that isn’t 4/4 (which most/all pop/EDM tends to be).

That’s actually kind of feasible. The player device usually has to be attached to the swimmer (modified iPods are popular, attached to the back of the goggles), because Bluetooth does not penetrate water. For that reason, many models include an MP3 player in the headphones - Sony makes a lovely-looking set of buds that have the player in the buds themselves. However, there is one earphone/player that can connect to WiFi. I didn’t look into it, but presumably WiFi can penetrate water?

The idea would be to connect the earphones to the WiFi network, connect the Roon endpoint to the same WiFi network, and there you go!

I ended up going for the underwateraudio.com Hydroactive earphones bundled with their SYRYN player. Bundled at Amazon (not the manufacturer’s website, for some reason) for $109. Now I just have to make a playlist and keep it interesting. #firstworldproblems

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