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Song color in iTunes

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bartek

27 Oct, 2009 10:00 AM

Hi,
I'd like to know if there's a way to see the song color (not tonal key) from BeaTunes in iTunes?

That would be great. I want to make a cover on a CD with colors of the each track and this would help me a lot.

regards
Bartek

1. 1 Posted by nimfakie on 27 Oct, 2009 11:08 AM

   

   This would be a nice-to-have for me too, but I'm not sure if it's possible? I'd love to create smart playlists by colour!

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2. Support Staff 2 Posted by hendrik on 27 Oct, 2009 01:05 PM

   

   Hi,

   iTunes does not have a way of displaying colors, so this would be hard.

   What you could do, is write a plugin that takes the color and dumps it into the comment (or some other) field in RGB format (e.g. red could be #ff0000). To use it for a smart playlist, it would probably make sense to reduce resolution, so something like #f00 would make more sense as you would end up with fewer distinct values (4096 instead of 16777216) and the chance that a non-fuzzy search leads to results will be much higher.

   In any case, you would encounter two problems:

   • colors in beaTunes aren't static - they actually change slightly over time as your collection changes
   • iTunes smart playlist filters are boolean, so you don't have a "like" operator

   Using beaTunes MatchLists (which you can update even after you created them using the same rules and filters) might be the better solution.

   -hendrik

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3. 3 Posted by nimfakie on 27 Oct, 2009 01:30 PM

   

   That makes sense--I'll stick with matchlists. Matching is actually brilliant--I used Moody for a while (if you don't know it: you assign "moods" to songs, rating them from calm to intense, and from sad to happy). I found that matching colours and "mood" playlists are very similar, so now I'm using beaTunes only. Saves me time, and the program still comes up with wonderful playlists.

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4. 4 Posted by nimfakie on 27 Oct, 2009 01:41 PM

   

   Forgot to add: something that works well for me is to sort by colour in beaTunes, then selecting 100 songs from a particular colour, and making a playlist from the selection. Sometimes I put the colour name into Grouping.

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5. hendrik closed this discussion on 02 Nov, 2009 09:02 PM.