Transferring Mixed In Key Data to iTunes Quickly
For those that want to have a more up to date music library of for DJs that want to get into beat juggling and harmonic mixing, Mixed In Key (MiK) is some very useful software. If you are like me and use iTunes to manage your music library (currently in the process of seeing if this needs to change), it can become slow to respond as your library increases in size.
There are three stages to ensuring that your library is up to date.
STEP 1. Setting Preferences in Mixed in Key
The first step is to load your songs into MiK so they can be analysed. Before you load songs into MiK, you need to ensure your preferences are appropriate. By doing this, it will ensure that the songs will be updated correctly.
Ensure that Update file tag is selected, write key and tempo is selected and in front of comments is selected.
STEP 2. Adding tracks to MiK
This can be done simply by having iTunes open in a window and selecting a group of songs, holding down the left mouse button, drag these to the MiK window.
Step 3. MiK will analyse
When you release the mouse button, MiK will analyse the tracks.
Step 4. Load Data into iTunes
This data is now stored inside the comments in each track. However, they will not be updated until iTunes is forced to look at the track. MiK tells you to go into the track’s data (Ctrl + I on windows or Cmd + I on Mac) and change a field that isn’t important. This takes a long time with a large number of tracks.
First, ensure that your tracks are sorted by checked/unchecked. This can be done by clicking on the tick mark in the header on the left of the main window.
Next, select a range of tracks, right click and choose “check/uncheck selection”.
This will then force iTunes to update the songs. This will allow you to continue to do other things and will mean that your data is not changed. Once you have changed the checked status, ensure that you do this again to return it to the original state.
Step 5. Create Playlists to check BPM
Once you have analysed all your songs, you can quickly check which tracks do not have the BPM entered into the correct field using the following two smart playlists.
Smart Playlist 1 – Missing BPM
Smart Playlist 2 – BPM =
By viewing Smart Playlist 2, you can see that you can edit all the songs with the BPM = 200. By selecting all the songs, you can edit the BPM fields of all the songs at once.
Step 6. Modify BPMs
By modifying Smart Playlist 2, you can cycle through each BPM til all the songs have the correct BPM. I recommend that you start at the highest BPM and work down, as if you start low at say 60, the rule “Comments contains 60” you will find that the songs will have songs that have BPMs of 60, 160, 260, etc. To avoid this, work from the highest down.
Continue to do this until all the tracks are completed!
Hopefully this has made it quicker to update track data! Let me know if you have any questions.
Submeg
music, iTunes
SUBMEG 