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Exercise Music - Geek Style
August 13, 2007
I've been working out at home lately. One of the things I do just about every day is go outside and walk briskly around the neighborhood for about 20 minutes. I thought it would be a good thing to listen to some music while I walk. So I got myself an iPod Nano.
I figured out how to put some music on it, and then I went walking. I quickly discovered that some of the songs I chose were my perfect walking pace, i.e., fast enough to keep me walking, well, briskly. Other songs were just not right. I either couldn't keep up, or they were way slow. It's really hard to NOT walk to a beat, whatever that beat might be.
Then I wondered how I could find all the songs in my collection that were my perfect walking pace. I started Googling for "exercise music" and "walking music" and found several sites that sell CDs or downloadable tracks that were organized by BPM, or beats per minute. Lots of this music was "perfectly remixed" to make it the right speed. But most of it wasn't by the original artists, or it was this cheesy 80's disco music, or collections of songs that I've never heard of.
I have several hundred songs in my personal collection, and I wanted those. Then I came upon www.bestworkoutmusic.com. They have a free program called BeatScanner. It scans songs and returns the beats per minute. I put in my two or three perfectly-paced songs, and discovered they were 126 BPM.
BeatScanner will scan your whole collection, and you can sort and make playlists. However, they don't really play nicely with iTunes. So, I was off to find another solution.
After some more searching around, I found beaTunes. It does a lot more than detecting beats per minute, but the fact that it stores the BPM in iTunes was what I really wanted. I didn't even realize that iTunes has a BPM column in the music library view, but it does. You can turn it on by clicking on View -> View Options. Both BeatScanner and beaTunes have options for manually determining BPM. You play the tune and tap on your keyboard when you hear the beats. There are lots of other online places that do this as well. Search for "beats per minute" in your favorite search engine, and you'll find lots. One of 'em is at www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm
With the BPM for every song now listed, it's a snap to organize my iTunes library and drag songs to my "walking" playlist and stick 'em on my iPod.
Because I'm a total geek, I started thinking about how I could speed up or slow down songs I have that I'd like to walk to but aren't the right BPM. I started thinking about this because on the same site that has BeatScanner, they have another program called Repacer, that claims to do just that. It costs $24.95, which isn't a fortune, but I already own two audio editing applications: Audacity (free) and SoundForge. Both these applications have options to change the tempo of any track. In Audacity, it's really simple.
Basically, you open the track, select it, and click on Effect->Change Tempo. You put in what the current BPM is and what you want to change it to. That's it!
Have a listen and hear for yourself. It really works!
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1Robyn | January 9, 2008
Debra -
Web design and exercise incentives! You will have a bright future. Got an ipod for Christmas, now I have more incentive to use it, bestworkoutmusic is great site.
MUCHAS GRACIAS! :-)