Pollux is a new Mac OS X application by Chetan Surpur and Shashwat Kandadai that will automatically tag your music files in iTunes. It is capable of tagging the name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics for each song, and it does so by analyzing the song's audio fingerprint. This means that it can draw on a database of tag information, and do so very accurately, even if the song has no identifying information at all to begin with.

To use Pollux, you select songs in iTunes, then from the Pollux icon in your menu bar, choose Tag Selected iTunes Tracks. Tagging can take a little while, so don't expect instant results. In my testing I found tags to return in anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds. Tagging an entire library this way could certainly take some time, but since it's all automated, why not? There is also an option in Pollux to automatically tag any new music that is imported into iTunes.

There are other applications that do similar things, but Pollux sets itself apart by being both unobtrusive and free. Pollux is still in beta, so you might experience a problem here and there, though in my limited testing it was solid.

Creating playlists can be tedious, and every bit of information can help. While some people maintain the ID3 tags in their MP3 files in excruciating detail, others (like me) can't seem to find the time. But when it comes to finding the tempo, no amount of manual ID3 tag maintenance will help.

If you're trying to put together a playlist that contains songs that are a similar speed, knowing the beats-per-minute of each song is immensely helpful. Luckily, there is a free download called BPM Analyzer from MixMeister that will analyze all of your MP3 tracks, and update the ID3 tags in them with exact BPM information. With that done, it's a simple matter of sorting your music library by the beats-per-minute field.

Now you can put together an upbeat energy-boosting playlist full of fast songs, a mellow playlist with slower songs, or pretty much anything you desire. And for the nerds like me, it's just another piece of information to sort and group your music by.

BPM Analyzer is available on both the Windows and Mac operating system.

[via Lifehacker]

Yahoo is letting users of the World Wide Web share in a sing song with the release of song lyrics.

Yahoo has teamed up with Gracenote to bring users song lyrics from all five major music publishers featuring the words for songs from U2, Price, The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Kanye West.

The new lyric database will be available through the Yahoo Music portal. This new initiative has just made Yahoo the largest licensed song lyrics database that is available to consumers. Users will now be able to search song lyrics from the Yahoo Music Search bar by entering a few lines of a song.

You know weird Al Yankovic right? I suppose you blocked that out from several years ago right? He has a new song out untitled "Don't Download this Song." He is trying desperately to get people to buy the CD, "like you know that you should" and extols young thugs and hooligans NOT to download his new song, because "cause you start out stealing songs, then you're robbin' liquor stores, and sellin' crack and runnin' over school-kids with your car." We all know the evils of downloading, that's why we all go to meetings to help with our downloading addiction.

My concern here is that Weird Al is sending a very mixed message, because not a few hundred pixels from his music video for the song is a "Download this song" button. This is the entire problem with the music business, they are two-faced. Don't download the song, but here it is if you want it. It's horrible and entrapping to many younger computer users. Someday we'll put a stop to this. Until then, I hope you realize that I am just kidding about the mixed message thing. I laughed my butt off twice. The music video is priceless. His song is pretty good too. Get a truly free music download for once, go download Weird Al's latest song, "Don't download this song."