How To Make Your Own Workout Music With The Right Beats

Apr. 13th, 2009 By Guy McDowell

If you’ve been to my personal blog, you know I’m a kind of big guy. Some say I’m big-boned, but really, I’ve never seen a fat skeleton. Anyway, enough self-deprecation. The point is, I would like to get healthier and that means leaner and that means exercise.

Walking is probably the best exercise for me, but I get bored. So I tried listening to music. But I love country music and that’s generally fairly slow. So I tried to find country music that had the range of beats to keep me going. That’s how I found Best Workout Music

Best WorkOut Music is one man’s effort to bring you your own brand of workout music.  Thank you Amnon! His site has some great features such as a music database that you can search by beats per minute and music genre. Although Tibetan Throat Singing doesn’t return many results.

Didn’t find songs that turn your crank? That’s okay, Amnon wrote some neat software that will scan your own music library and give you the beat count for each song. It’s called….BeatScanner. Clever name, eh?

BeatScanner

As you can see above, BeatScanner lets you scan your music collection. Then you can have it automatically find the beats by clicking Find Song Tempo. Sometimes that doesn’t work though, and then you can click on Detect to manually determine the beat.

You can then move on to creating your playlist. To get the best playlist, enter the beats per minute (BPM) that you are looking for as well as the range, which is a plus or minus value.

Okay, my tastes are a little eclectic. Now, just check the songs that you want to have in your playlist. As you do this, BeatScanner will show you the total playlist time. Nice for tailoring the length of your workout. Once you choose a song the Save Playlist button appears. You know what clicking that will do.

Now that you have your list, you can sort the playlist to your tastes and then save it with a custom name, genre and description. I like the way that you can either save the songs directly to a disk or MP3 player from here, or just save the playlist within BeatScanner.

With my wide and varied tastes, and short-term memory issues, I sometimes can’t recall what I called the playlists. Under the Find Playlists tab, you can search through them by keywords.

But wait, there’s more! Go to the Recommend Playlists tab and update to the website. This feature allows Best WorkOut Music to create a better song library and some nice pre-compiled playlists. Doing this can earn you an activation code, valued at $24.95, for Repacer – Amnon’s software to tweak the beat of your music.

Really like Enya but can’t exercise to it? Repacer! How about your wedding dance song? Repacer!

Using Repacer is as simple as 1-2-3! Pick your song, pace your song, and save your song.

Pick It!!!

Pace It!!!

Save It!!!

(Ron Popeil would be so proud!)

I tested Repacer with Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive. Bon Jovi rocks, on occasion. The song is 50 BPM, so I pumped it up to 100 BPM. It sounded like some crazy bluegrass song gone wrong, so I wouldn’t recommend changing the pace of any song by more than about 20%. Although, it should be noted that the pitch of the song did NOT change! I’m impressed.

With all of the tools at Best WorkOut Music, you can get your sweaty groove on to what ever music fits your fancy. Next thing you know, you’ll be shaking your svelte-self on the dance floor too! Go on over and let Amnon know who sent you.

Which apps do YOU workout to?

(By) Guy likes words and occasionally forms complete sentences. He can count to potato. Check out his USB shilling at USBDriven.com.

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15 Comments Add Comment
2009-04-13 15:35:10

Nice one Guy. This is just what I need for my new workout.

2009-04-13 16:01:31
herb

SWEEET! I had a Zune for a week and about the only thing I really loved was their jogging subscription as it featured songs with the right bpm for each activity (walk, jog and running). I loved the idea, but not their song choices.

Now I can make my own list with my own music!

2009-04-13 16:53:09

This is so great! Thank you! I just put out a request on my blog for workout music recs, but with this app I can find (or make) my own new playlist.

(Btw, BonJovi’s “It’s My Life” is a great walking song, for both the music and the lyrics. :) )

2009-04-13 18:43:57
odin

Does anyone know where it stores the bpm info? Is it in the ID3 tag in a way that itunes can understand it? I’d expect it doesn’t since it looks like the most recent release was over a year ago.

I use itunes smart playlists to generate self-updating playlists with various criteria, and it would be great to able to do that with my workout playlists based on bpm.

2009-04-13 21:20:33

I e-mailed Amnon, the developer, to come check out the article. Hopefully, he can answer your question for you. I don’t know much about iPods or the inner workings of Mp3’s. Although I should learn some more about them.

2009-04-15 17:47:36

MAN!!! i’ve been wating for something like that!!!

ROCK ON!

2009-04-16 23:25:10

Thanks Hezi, Amnon will be glad to read that. I try to support those programmers out there that are just trying to do something nice and help people, and maybe make a couple bucks while their at it. Amnon seems to be one of those guys.

2009-04-17 08:00:09

This is one of the best “I will make use of” article. Kickass!!!!!!

2009-04-17 15:58:32

Virendra,
High praise indeed! Thank you.

2009-04-24 06:55:56
sara

Are you a Supernatural fan?! Sorry I just had to ask because of the “Bon Jovi rocks. On occasion” comment! :D

2009-04-25 00:05:49

Yes, yes I am! I love that show. Best thing on TV since Jericho.

2009-04-25 14:15:21
Paul Foraker
Subscribed to comments via email

Cool. This could even be used with PCals http://www.pcals.com

2009-06-05 10:42:14

it is so great,your article is my meed workout article

2009-07-20 02:22:57
Subscribed to comments via email

Thanks for sharing this. This is great.

2009-07-20 07:38:29

You’re welcome! Drop Amnon an e-mail too. He’ll be glad to hear it.

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