Knowing the BPM (beats per minute) of your music is of course essential for both understanding better where various genres of music fit on the BPM scale and also for mixing those tunes together once you know.
Nearly all the software people DJ with automatically calculates the BPM of your music for you – it’s part of the loading time taken when you drag a new track onto a DJ deck in Virtual DJ, Traktor or Serato etc.
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But what if you don’t have DJ software yet? What if you don’t want your whole collection in your DJ software? What if you just want to fill in the BPM ID3 tag of your files in iTunes?
Luckily, there’s a little-known free program that will do that (and only that) for you. It’s from the makers of DJ mix automation software Mixmeister, and it’s called BPM Analyzer. It’s available for PC and Mac, and you can get it from here:
Download MixMeister BPM Analyzer for free
It couldn’t be simpler to use – you just drag and drop your files and watch MixMeister BPM Analyzer review them one by one.
I’d recommend running it overnight if you’ve got a big collection – and don’t forget to ask your iTunes (or whatever library software you use) to rescan the ID3 tags of your MP3s once you’re done. The reason is that some software (including iTunes) doesn’t do this automatically.
Have you got any little free pieces of software that you couldn’t live without? Let us know in the comments.