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?
