Color coding
Hello,
I would like to know how the color coding is calculated. What each color mean?
Thank you,
Steve ST-Pierre
si vous avez noté un problème ou un autre comportement anormal, vous pouvez joindre des fichiers d'historique de /Users/Steve/Library/Logs/beaTunes
- beaTunes : 3.5.11
- JVM : Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM
- Version : 20.14-b01-447
- Vendor : Apple Inc.
- OS : Mac OS X 10.8.3, x86_64
- Library: iTunes
- Registered as : Student Needs.ca - Besoins particuliers Steve ST-Pierre
Keyboard shortcuts
Generic
| ? | Show this help |
|---|---|
| ESC | Blurs the current field |
Comment Form
| r | Focus the comment reply box |
|---|---|
| ^ + ↩ | Submit the comment |
You can use Command ⌘ instead of Control ^ on Mac
Support Staff 1 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 19 Apr, 2013 12:00 PM
Hi,
when two songs in your collection have the same color, it simply means that they are similar with respect to their frequency spectrum.
E.g. "red" itself does not have meaning whatsoever. But when two songs are red, it means that they share some properties.
Does this help?
-hendrik
2 Posted by Steve ST-Pierre on 19 Apr, 2013 06:44 PM
Do you have more informations? Is it a mind of matrix? Do you have the formula for that? I am doing a psychological research using your software and I would like to use it as a measurement tools.
Could you help me to find the information ?
Steve ST-Pierre
Support Staff 3 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 21 Apr, 2013 11:40 AM
Hi,
I'm sorry, but there is no documentation on this.
-hendrik
4 Posted by Martin on 27 Jun, 2013 07:41 AM
I'd also like to know this. Spectral centroid maybe?
Support Staff 5 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 28 Jun, 2013 08:21 AM
Martin,
spectral centroid is one-dimensional and therefore hard to project into a 3D space (RGB). It's more like multi-dimensional, bark scaled intensities, projected into 3D space using PCA. As such it has some shortcomings, as PCA requires all values of the set to do its projection. If the set changes (a song is added/deleted), all values have to be re-computed. This is why "color" will probably be re-implemented in a future version of beaTunes.
-hendrik
6 Posted by Martin Weiss Ha... on 28 Jun, 2013 09:11 AM
Hi henrik,
Thanks for you reply.
Regards,
Martin
On Jun 28, 2013, at 10:21 , "hendrik" <[email blocked]> wrote:
Support Staff 7 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 28 Jun, 2013 09:18 AM
You're welcome...
Out of curiosity—since "spectral centroid" certainly isn't in everybody's vocabulary—what sparked the interest?
-hendrik
8 Posted by Martin Weiss Ha... on 28 Jun, 2013 09:40 AM
I've been using beaTunes lately, for organizing my DJ mixes. I'm doing a monthly radio show on Sense.FM (https://soundcloud.com/the-marsbar).
And I'm quite interested in signal processing. I've done an MSc in Digital Music Processing at Queen Mary, University of London.
Regards,
Martin
Support Staff 9 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 28 Jun, 2013 10:25 AM
Very cool!
Queen Mary seems to be the European epicenter of MIR—I run into Queen Mary folks pretty much at every ISMIR.
If you ever find yourself wanting to write your own analyzer for beaTunes (key, BPM, ..) - take a look at http://www.beatunes.com/beatlet-songpropertyanalyzer.html It's easier than it seems at first. :-)
Cheers,
-hendrik
10 Posted by Martin Weiss Ha... on 28 Jun, 2013 07:07 PM
Ah cool :) Thank you.
Have a nice weekend.
Regards,
Martin
11 Posted by Brian Santell on 29 Aug, 2013 02:32 PM
can the colors be imported into itunes? I analyzed my songs against my itunes library and I see things like bpm being updated in itunes, but I don't know where in itunes the color coding is stored.
thank you
Support Staff 12 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 30 Aug, 2013 08:05 AM
Hi Brian,
unfortunately, iTunes does not support the color concept.
-hendrik
13 Posted by Tom on 10 Oct, 2014 09:45 AM
@ Hendrk,
Maybe I misunderstood, but based on the PCA theory, I understand the RGB values are filled with 3 different values? Where does this different values come from insectly?
I am making a data visualization of my music library and the color data could be a very interesting addition!
Thanks in advance!
-Tom
Support Staff 14 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 10 Oct, 2014 10:01 AM
The color values are computed differently in beaTunes 4 compared to beaTunes 3.
In beaTunes 4 we first compute a mel-spaced power spectrum which is then projected into a another space of which only the strongest 3 dimensions are considered. The projection happens via a matrix multiplication. In beaTunes 4 this matrix is constant and has been computed using PCA for a variety of songs from different genres.
Hope this helps.
15 Posted by Tom on 10 Oct, 2014 10:56 AM
Thanks for the quick answer!
I googled a bit about power spectrums, but I can't get an idea of where it's based on. Can you rephrase your answer, I am not an sound expert haha
Is it possible to make some kind of legenda based on the colors? Where different colors are linked to specific music related categories?
Support Staff 16 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 10 Oct, 2014 04:01 PM
Basically you calculate the STFT over a number of signal windows, calculate their power spectra and transform them to mel bins (aka bark scale) and average them per bin. Then project the result into another space of which you take the top three dimensions as RGB.
Why SFTF? It let's you determine how "strong" a frequency in the signal is. And when applying the SFTF you end up with a complex result. The magnitude of the (complex) value
xis it's absolute value, i.e.|x|, the power is|x|^2. In other words it lets you determine how much energy/power is in a given frequency bin => Power spectrum.No.
Color is not the same as genre or mood. It's merely an indicator for similarity in frequency distribution.
Say, e.g. some piece of music is vocal only. It will most likely have a different frequency distribution than a piece that features piano only. Since some genres feature specific instruments, it's natural that they also have a certain frequency distribution. So there is a connection, but I wouldn't use it to guess a genre. As I said - it's an indicator of a certain kind of fairly low level similarity.
17 Posted by Sol Rosenberg on 16 Oct, 2014 01:54 AM
Hendrik,
So basically how would somebody use the color system for their advantage? How can it help you. I understand that it groups songs that are similar in frequency and it's "low level", but how does that help "joe listener" like me?
Do people use colors to make playlists for example?
Thank you!!
Support Staff 18 Posted by Hendrik Schreib... on 16 Oct, 2014 08:53 AM
Color similarity does not predict musical similarity for sure, but it is an indicator for it.
Just like genre does not for sure say that two songs match each other.
It is helpful to create playlists with matching songs or simply find songs that have a higher probability to match one another.
The best use for the color feature is to create matchlists or find matching songs in that panel right below the main table. Both use rulesets defined in the preferences that allow for a mixture of multiple rules (one of the color, if you're interested in that kind of match).