As If We Need Another Reason to Hate DRM: Protected Music the Rotten Fruit in the Tangerine Barrel

Before iTunes 8 and the "Genius" feature, there were a few, and just a few, options for Mac users wanting to automatically generate Smart Playlists built on complex characteristics like BPM ("Beats Per Minute"), Intensity, and the more esoteric personal "style". Pandora, a great service no longer available in Canada thanks to the moronic music industry hacks whose main strategy to save their corporations is to antagonize and alienate customers and make the product, music, inaccessible and inconvenient... was one online option. It used the "Music Genome Project" algorithm that actually involved humans rating music. The human touch is still the most accurate.

Another option was Tangerine by Potion Factory. The advantage of this application was its iTunes integration, though BPM accuracy is in the range only about 70% of the time. Download the application, drag it into your Applications folder, launch it, and without further adieu it starts analyzing your iTunes library. It will cost you $25 to export the results into your iTunes library.

Given the number of songs...

(All of them paid for... in one way or another.)

you can expect your Mac to take some time on the calculations, however, even given the extent of a 50,000 strong library, Tangerine seemed to stall far too repeatedly.

To cut a painfully long story down to pithy, and painfully written, blog post: Tangerine is stymied by the DRM iTunes puts on non-iTunes Plus music.

The solution is to exclude Protected music from analysis. To do this, you could peruse Andy Kim's blog archives, of Potion Factory fame, for this brief entry and to read the hint "I suggest filtering out protected songs using the rules in Tangerine!'s preferences..." If you didn't find this advice, the solution is to go to Tangerine Prefs:

Click on "Rules", and then "Edit".

Add "Protected AAC Audio File" to the Default Rule.

Tangerine will then only analyze the remaining songs that are not excluded via the preference rules.

The long and the short is, once again, the music industry feels consumers will flock to buying music of lower quality and greater inconvenience than free, high-quality, convenient pirated material.

If the labels provided the BPM, and other detailed information, it might be able to make some pretense at providing value for the inconvenience of DRM. But they provide nothing.

Nope, if you're interested in automatic music playlists for classes, it's sad to say, but stick to torrented files.

Sigh.