bpmcli is a collection of python programs for manipulating the BPM field of the ID3 tag of an MPD. It uses sox (play) to play songs starting from 50 seconds in, and you can tap with the beat with the spacebar and then tag the song when you think you've got the BPM set right.

bpmtap

bpmtap walks through all of the songs in the current folder looking for files without the BPM set. When it finds one, it starts to play it so that the user can tap the spacebar along with the song. Once the user is satisfied, they can write the new tag to the mp3.

Keys

spacebar - a beat
q - quit
g - go to the next song (skip)
1 - tag the playing file with the BPM that you have tapped.
2 - tag the playing file with 2 times the BPM that you tapped.
4 - tag the playing file with 4 times the BPM that you tapped.

bpmsave

A common problem with ID3 taggers and music libraries is that when updating the tag, not all of the fields will be re-written. To solve this problem, bpmsave and bpmrestore were written. bpmsave will walk through the current folder and sub-folders looking for mp3 files with BPM set and if they are, it will output that data on stdout.

bpmsave > ../bpms.txt

bpmrestore

bpmrestore can take that data and make sure that all of the files in the subfolders still have the BPM set.

bpmrestore ../bpms.txt

Installing

Follow the instructions to setup the goobsoft PPA. Then run

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bpmcli