24-10-08

Beats per Minute using Python

Inspired by the recent news that Stayin' Alive has the perfect BPM count for reanimating people, I set out to write a small Python script to determine the BPM of my music collection.

Did you know that Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bros' "When will I be famous" have the same speed? And that PJ Harvey's Kamikaze is really mindbogglingly quick at 170 BPM? It's even quicker than stupid gabber house! (My taste for music is great, isn't it?)

Anyways, if you wan't to measure this yourself, use the following program:

"""
bpm.py

Simple adaptive curses based beat per minute counter
(c) 2008  C. Jasper Spaans <j@jasper.es>
"""
import os
import time
import curses

s = curses.initscr()
curses.noecho()
curses.cbreak()

n = 2
prevtimes = []
c = None
try:
    while (c != 27):
        c = s.getch()
        prevtimes.append(time.time())
        while len(prevtimes) >= n+1:
            d = (prevtimes[-1] - prevtimes.pop(0))
            s.addstr(0,0, "%3d %d" % ( n*60/d, n))
            if d<2:
                n = min(8, n + 1)
            if d>4:
                n = max(1, n - 1)
except:
    curses.nocbreak()
    curses.echo()
    curses.endwin()
    raise

curses.nocbreak()
curses.echo()
curses.endwin()