A few weeks back I provided a quick preview of Cadence, an app for iPhone that promised to allow a totally new way to browse your music collection — by tempo. It’s out in the App Store now for $2.99 (link will launch iTunes), and having spent time with it today, I can confirm that it does exactly what it promises to. Unfortunately, setup is both wonky and time-consuming, which was disappointing.
To find out whether Cadence is for you, click through.
The actual iPhone app Cadence is quite lovely: simple, intuitive, and highly functional. You’re basically presented with an image of a metronome, and you slide your finger up and down it to trigger music at various beats-per-minute rates. It’s pretty great — I discovered all kinds of songs I had more or less forgotten were in my iTunes collection (having 5,000 songs will do that; I can only imagine what those of you with 40,000 or more do about it!). I can definitely see myself using this in the future, if only to bring a sense of structured randomness to my collection.
I wish I could recommend the app without any caveats, but I really can’t. It’s nothing to do with Cadence itself, which functions as advertised. The program is let down a bit by its supporting cast. You see, the iPhone app doesn’t magically know the tempo of all of your music. Instead, it relies on metadata from iTunes to make these calculations. And if you, like me, don’t have your beats per minute sorted out in advance (and I can’t imagine how you would), you’ll need to use Cadence Desktop (currently Mac-only) to analyze all of your music, then export that data as a set of tempo-specific playlists, ranging from 70 to 200 bpm, in my experience.
This, to put it mildly, is time-consuming. The first pass through my iTunes library took 78 minutes — and I’ve got a one-year-old machine. It might be significantly more time-consuming on even a circa-2007 Mac. Worse, it couldn’t analyze about 700 of my songs correctly, so they’re just not visible to Cadence. But even after that investment of time, you’re not done yet. Then you need to sync all those playlists — and your entire music library, as iTunes won’t just add the BPM meta-data to the music on your iPhone, it replaces all of it. This took another hour-plus for me.
After all of that, then your iPhone will be ready, and…Cadence still won’t be good to go. Then you need to go into your iPod app on the iPhone and wait for it to finish updating your library. Only then will Cadence work, and brilliantly so.
But it’s a long road to get there. I’m glad I have it and will use it often. I admire what the developers have done, and I only wish the back-end didn’t have to be so kludgy.
It’s available here (App Store link).
