Hendrik

You might also want to make sure that you check “embed non iTunes fields” in the beaTunes general prefs, if you are using an iTunes based library (contrary to a folder-based library). Otherwise the key is not embedded when beaTunes analyzes for keys.

Bartboy, post: 3917 wrote: I just recently purchased BeaTunes and I like it. But I’m having a little trouble getting around in it. I previously used MIK to key my songs and for a long time I have been looking for a different program to do this. After reading Phil’s article about it I decided to give it a go. I’m not sure if it’s because I used MIK before but I can see in BeaTunes that the Key for the song is say F# Major and then BeaTunes uses a similar style to MIK but it doesn’t post this is the Key section of the Track when I open Traktor it just shows me the actual Key. I have printed out the Circle of Fifths to memorize instead. I’m still working on getting the Playlists working. For some reason everyone of my tracks is rated in Traktor but the ratings do not show up in BeaTunes.

Hi,

First of all – I really appreciate this question, as it lets me explain the difference between a value itself and a rendering of that same value.

Here we go:

beaTunes detects keys and writes that information to the (in the case of mp3s) id3 tags of your audio file. It does this exactly as specified in the id3 specification, posted at http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames#line-385 There it’s clearly stated that programs, if they want to conform to the id3 standard, must write musical keys names to the TKEY tag. E.g. D Flat Minor (Camelot: 12A, Open Key Notation (OKN): 5m) must be written as “Dbm”. Very simple.

Any software that correctly implements the id3 specification does exactly that. Because it ensures interoperability, that is a good thing.

Now, you might argue that you really don’t care about the musical name of the key, you want to see notation XYZ in your software and therefore programs should be allowed to write XYZ notation to the TKEY tag.

And here comes the point I mentioned at the beginning. If all programs wrote the key correctly in the way the spec states it should be written (i.e. “Dbm”), other software that reads the tag, can rely on the TKEY string having that format and then choose to render it in another way, e.g. as “12A” or “5m” or “@#$”.

There is no need to write the key in any other format to the tag.
There is just a need to render it in different ways.

“Dbm” is the standard way to encode D Flat Minor, while any software displaying the TKEY field should decode this value to show, i.e. render, the actual name in whatever notation the user chooses. This is exactly what beaTunes does. It renders the key name as musical name and additionally in OKN (http://www.beatunes.com/open-key-notation.html). In order to conform to the id3 spec, it does not write any fancy notation to the TKEY tag, because that would make it hard for other software to properly handle the tag.

Ideally, Native Instruments added functionality to their software that lets you choose the notation you would like to see your keys in. I really hope they do this. Perhaps contacting Native Instruments support helps to speed up the process.

The second issue: I’m not sure what kind of ratings you are referring to and whether Traktor embeds these in the files. Therefore it’s hard to give a good answer.

However, if you have beaTunes specific questions, please check out http://help.beatunes.com/

Hope this helped,

-hendrik
(author of beaTunes)