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I'm a bit picky about ensuring that all of my music has the proper tags in iTunes. I rip all of my music from CDs or purchase it by the album from Amazon, this provides good coverage. I then use Get Lyrical to add in lyrics information. What I'm missing is a good source of BPM information. I've tried various programs such as MixMeister BPM Analyzer to calculate the BPM of music, but they're never quite right (There is no way the entirety of Metallica's Black album is 128,000 BPM).

I've found a couple of source of databases with BPMs for music, such as BPM4DJs.com, but they don't have tools to access the data. Is there a database and tool that I can feed a set of tagged MP3s into that will automatically get the BPMs for songs (not some auto-calculated value) and tag my MP3s with the right values?

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Not perfect, but with the plugin foo_run for foobar2000 you could easily launch a web search with your tags (fb2k is to iTunes what firefox 3.5 is to IE 6...)

So, now that everything is installed, to launch a bm4djs.com search on artist & title with foo_run, add a new service with this path properties (in foobar2000 preferences > tools > run services):

http://www.bpm4djs.com/index.php?app_mode=search&search=true&site=1&sv_artist=$replace(%artist%, ,+)&sv_title=$replace(%title%, ,+)&sv_accuracy=tolerant&sv_genere=4&submit=Go

for album & title:

http://www.bpm4djs.com/index.php?app_mode=search&search=true&site=1&sv_title=$replace(%title%, ,+)&sv_album=$replace(%album%, ,+)&sv_accuracy=tolerant&sv_genere=4&submit=Go

for artist alone:

http://www.bpm4djs.com/index.php?app_mode=search&search=true&site=1&sv_artist=$replace(%artist%, ,+)&sv_accuracy=tolerant&sv_genere=4&submit=Go

for artist & bpm (if your bpm tag name is "BPM"):

http://www.bpm4djs.com/index.php?app_mode=search&search=true&site=1&sv_artist=$replace(%artist%, ,+)sv_bpm=%bpm%&sv_accuracy=tolerant&sv_genere=4&submit=Go

etc...

You could certainly tweak it better with the foobar2000's title formatting and a little study of the search url of bpm4dj or any other website...

And, cherry on the cake, foobar2000 recently got a BPM plugin, it's still in early stage but the dev looks motivated.

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    This is pretty helpful and I'll take a look at it. It looks like the data is pretty sparse right now and contains numerous errors -- my first song I tested was misspelled in the database.
    – Pridkett
    Jan 5, 2010 at 20:41
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    Well, the bounty is running out and this is the best answer I've seen. Ergo, I pronounce you the winner good sir. I guess there just aren't many people outside of DJs who are really interested in this stuff. I just wish runners would realize that setting their music to a proper BPM can affect their running.
    – Pridkett
    Jan 10, 2010 at 16:01
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Here's a great article written by a guy who wrote a click track detector to analyze the BPM of a song: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click-track/. Interestingly, the program shows that some artists use click tracks while others do not, which could explain some of the more mysterious results you've seen in your BPM-per-song search.

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