Software for creating non-stop music mixes?
September 28, 2021 1:47 PM Subscribe
I want to create non-stop mixes from my music library, for walking/jogging. Like, a solid hour of one song transitioning into another, with matched BPM.
Episodes of A State Of Trance are kind of what I'm shooting for, a bunch of songs of identical or similar BPM seamlessly strung together.
Ideally, the software would be able to analyze a track and determine its average BPM with some accuracy, and also be able to slightly speed up or slow down tracks to match a target BPM. Mac or Windows is fine. Free is nice, but I'm fine with buying a package if it does what I want; I just don't want to spend a ton of money on something I'm just messing around with. I am particularly interested in recommendations based on personal experience, and would prefer something with an easy learning curve. Thank you!
Episodes of A State Of Trance are kind of what I'm shooting for, a bunch of songs of identical or similar BPM seamlessly strung together.
Ideally, the software would be able to analyze a track and determine its average BPM with some accuracy, and also be able to slightly speed up or slow down tracks to match a target BPM. Mac or Windows is fine. Free is nice, but I'm fine with buying a package if it does what I want; I just don't want to spend a ton of money on something I'm just messing around with. I am particularly interested in recommendations based on personal experience, and would prefer something with an easy learning curve. Thank you!
It's not its primary function Acoustica Mixcraft for doing this :)
It's quite user-friendly and intuitive.
posted by wats at 2:04 PM on September 28, 2021
It's quite user-friendly and intuitive.
posted by wats at 2:04 PM on September 28, 2021
Beatunes can also do this. By which I mean it can detect the BPM and key of each track - giving you the option of either creating your own playlist that matches by beat/ harmony - or of auto-creating one.
posted by rongorongo at 3:14 PM on September 28, 2021
posted by rongorongo at 3:14 PM on September 28, 2021
Rekordbox is what pro DJs use, and the basic version is free. It analyses BPM and key, and has a mixer built in. This is what pro DJs use to set up USBs to work with Pioneer CDJs - so as an added bonus, if you enjoy making mixes, you'll be able to easily move up to live DJing on hardware like this at parties etc.
posted by Spacelegoman at 3:32 PM on September 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Spacelegoman at 3:32 PM on September 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
Windows Media Player has Crossfading and auto volume leveling built-in. And so does many other music players. Not sure about matching BPM or BPM manipulation though.
posted by kschang at 5:00 PM on September 28, 2021
posted by kschang at 5:00 PM on September 28, 2021
Searching crossfade yielded "Pacemaker" for iOS and ITunes, and MixOnSet for Spotify and Tidal.
posted by kschang at 5:04 PM on September 28, 2021
posted by kschang at 5:04 PM on September 28, 2021
Best answer: djay does a pretty good job at this. It can pull from Tidal (used to do Spotify but Spotify said no more fun) as well if you'd like to get your music from the cloud. They have desktop and mobile apps (all top platforms).
The automix feature in djay (and in rekordobx) however is not smart about which tracks to play when — it goes either in the order you have it in a playlist or in random order. That means you may have a transition between a high BPM track and a low one — it will sound okay, relatively speaking, but it's not intelligently choosing the song order based on what will flow well together.
That said, djay (and rekordbox) will analyze the tracks for you so you could pretty easily put together a playlist of only songs within a certain BPM range that will generally sound good together and let the automix do what it does, in order or randomly.
Note that Rekordbox does not have a mobile app — if you want to use it for walking around you'd have to record the mixes ahead of time out of the software and play them back as their own song files. Further, the automix feature in Rekordbox is not available in the free version.
Generally if you're at all interested in messing around with songs beyond solving this one need, I highly recommend djay — it does most of what the fancy DJ software does, plus a lot of other fun stuff, is available on mobile for on-the-go messing around, works with most DJ controllers you can buy and is generally way friendlier to get into than Rekordbox.
posted by wemayfreeze at 6:19 PM on September 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
The automix feature in djay (and in rekordobx) however is not smart about which tracks to play when — it goes either in the order you have it in a playlist or in random order. That means you may have a transition between a high BPM track and a low one — it will sound okay, relatively speaking, but it's not intelligently choosing the song order based on what will flow well together.
That said, djay (and rekordbox) will analyze the tracks for you so you could pretty easily put together a playlist of only songs within a certain BPM range that will generally sound good together and let the automix do what it does, in order or randomly.
Note that Rekordbox does not have a mobile app — if you want to use it for walking around you'd have to record the mixes ahead of time out of the software and play them back as their own song files. Further, the automix feature in Rekordbox is not available in the free version.
Generally if you're at all interested in messing around with songs beyond solving this one need, I highly recommend djay — it does most of what the fancy DJ software does, plus a lot of other fun stuff, is available on mobile for on-the-go messing around, works with most DJ controllers you can buy and is generally way friendlier to get into than Rekordbox.
posted by wemayfreeze at 6:19 PM on September 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
You mentioned that you wanted your music for walking or jogging. In this realm there are some slightly different tools to make a playlist for you. In this case the observation is that a dance-floor style playlist at x BPM is not always the best for an individual playlist - sometimes you want the tempo of the music to match the tempo that you are walking or running - and perhaps to drive it on a little. For this use-case there are some different apps available - a quick review of some of the options here.
posted by rongorongo at 12:51 AM on September 29, 2021
posted by rongorongo at 12:51 AM on September 29, 2021
Mixmeister can do this. You probably only need the Express version which automates a lot of the process.
posted by mr_silver at 5:42 AM on September 29, 2021
posted by mr_silver at 5:42 AM on September 29, 2021
Response by poster: Thanks for all the input! Looks like djay does exactly what I'm looking for.
posted by xedrik at 7:21 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by xedrik at 7:21 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
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