
Getting Started
Introduction
Tangerine! is an application that lets you easily create playlists of upbeat music, or playlists for relaxing. It works by analyzing the BPM and the beat intensity of your music.
BPM, which stands for beats per minute, is a standard musical term and is a measure of a song's tempo. Songs with high BPM will tend to be more energetic and uplifting, while songs with low BPM are more calming and relaxing. Beat intensity, on the other hand, is not a standard musical term. It is a number between 1 and 100 that Tangerine! assigns to a song based on how strong the detected beat is. Using Tangerine! you can have your Mac analyze your iTunes songs for BPM and beat intensity and create playlists using the two criterias as main parameters.
Analysis
When first launched, Tangerine! will analyze the songs in your iTunes library. Actually, Tangerine! will analyze any music it has not yet analyzed every time it is launched. Therefore, you don't need to worry about having new music analyzed. During analysis, the tangerine button on the bottom right of the main window will rotate. When you click that button, the analysis progress window will open:
Playlist Generation
After your library is sufficiently analyzed, you can create playlists based on the analysis
results by clicking the
button in the main window to create a new playlist.
Here you choose the parameters of your new playlist. The beats per minute and beat intensity sliders let you choose a range of values to create the playlist from. The matching songs count updates as you adjust the sliders to let you know how many songs total in your music library match the parameters. The generation patterns let you specify what "shape" you want your playlist to have.
If you would like to limit your songs to only songs from a certain playlist, genre, or other criterias, you can use the "Edit Rules..." button to specify those rules. After you have everything set, you can also save the settings to a preset with the plus button.
Playlist Shape
When you generate a playlist, your new playlist will be shown in the bottom half of the main window. Each box represents a song in your playlist. The width of the box shows the duration of the song and the height shows the BPM of the song. By looking at the playlist this way you can quickly see what its characteristics are. For example, you can tell whether the transitions between songs will be smooth or not rather easily.
Save Playlist
After you have created your playlist, you can just enjoy it in Tangerine!, but you can save it to iTunes to listen there, to take with you on the iPod, or to create smart playlists from.
To save, you simply click the button.
Congratulations!
You should now have an idea of what Tangerine! is about and familiarized yourself with its basic operations. We hope that you will have fun with Tangerine! and that it will help you save much time spent on creating the perfect playlists for various activities.