Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

For a variety of reasons, I'm looking for a library that can not only determine the BPM of a song but count how many beats and bars are in it, excluding the introduction and finish of the song where there may be no actual music. (In other words it's not just a case of dividing the track length in real-number minutes by the BPM). Furthermore, one application has the complication of working with music that isn't four quarter-beats in a bar (i.e. 4/4 notation) - it might be 2/4, 3/4, 6/8 or 12/8. I do know this ahead of time - mostly - but automatic detection would be nice. The other application will require millisecond-precision locations of each beat, and must be able to compensate for tempo changes in the song.

So I've started a MicroPledge project for it and pledged $100US of my own money. The project must run on Linux, Mac OS-X and Windows and must also use an open source license, preferably the GPLv3. But I guess this is a bit of a bleg (thank you Mary Gardiner for introducing me to that term :-) if anyone knows of such a thing or some project that I can add code to.

Now to watch it fade into obscurity as I cast around for some way to write the thing myself...