Apple Music is changing the BPM of songs, not the tempo, the BPM...WHY?

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Apple Music is changing the BPM of songs, not the tempo, the BPM...WHY?

I'm NOT imagining this, this is actually happening. I have about 20K songs in Apple Music, primarily from CDs loaded into the machine and downloads from DJ record pool sites. Only about a 1/4 to a 1/3 purchased through iTunes or Apple Music. I don't stream any music with Apple Music or Spotify or any other streaming platform. I've manually entered the BPM of many songs, many songs downloaded from DJ pools already has it on the track.

Recently, the last several versions of Apple Music are changing the BPM of songs. Not while they're playing, it changes the BPM numbers that are already entered. I could understand if I had entered a song at 104 BPM and it's actually 105 and it changes it. However, it changes songs randomly and the new BPM is not even close. Another crazy things is a ballad, a slow song with the BPM of 65 is changed to 130 and a song that is 140 is changed to 70.

[Edited by Moderator]

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.3

Posted on Jun 4, 2025 12:43 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,729 points

Jun 5, 2025 05:49 AM in response to IsAppleLosingIt

As ed says BPM is a data field that iTunes and Music can read from the metadata stored in a file's tag and display as information. The value doesn't affect playback in any way, nor will Music or iTunes attempt to identify a track's BPM. In general Music will assume that all the data it holds about a particular track is correct, but the metadata is refreshed when an item is accessed for playback. In such cases it can become aware of data that has been changed outside of Music, e.g. by third party tagging software. There is also a fairly obscure bug with .mp3 files that have multiple tags where it isn't clearly defined which tag Music will write to or read from. This can potentially result in changes that you make undoing themselves at a later date. See Repair security permissions for iTunes/Music for Mac - Apple Community for background.

tt2

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Answer 2

ed2345

Level 9

63,428 points

Jun 4, 2025 05:00 PM in response to IsAppleLosingIt

IALI,

That is surprising. The Music app (like iTunes before it) treats BPM as a retrieve-only field; it lets you populate and display it but does not process it in any way. Is it possible that you have something else running that is messing with the BPM field?

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Answer 3

Jun 5, 2025 03:54 AM in response to ed2345

Regardless if it a "retrieve-only" field or not, it has to be something else, something that is within music or options within the operating system because no other apps are running. At least that I'm aware of. For example; I just now force quite everything on my mac, I turned off wifi so there couldn't be any outside connection and then opened Apple Music. I have all the songs opened and arranged in BPM order from lowest to highest. I click on various songs to play them and it immediately will jump various songs to a slightly higher or lower BPM. This is annoying itself, but I thought this could simply be inaccuracy and it was correcting a wrong BPM. A song I had at 104 gets moved down to 102 or up to 105 or something like that. But I also find songs that are easily 8-10-15 beats higher or lower than their actual BPM. Or as previously mentioned it takes a slow ballad song with a BPM of 60 and doubles it, or a faster song that has a BPM of 140 or 150 and reduces it to half.

What options in settings or with Apple Music could affect this? I also checked for viruses and malware on my machine but it's clean.

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Answer 4

Jun 5, 2025 06:40 AM in response to turingtest2

Ok, where does third party tagging, or multiple tags happen? This happens to songs I've purchased through iTunes or Apple Music as well as others I either uploaded from a CD or downloaded from a DJ pool. It happens to music I've never even played or put on a play list with either DJ software. It seems like an exhausting ongoing process to "fix" songs over and over?

I appreciate the input, but it ultimately seems like I'll have to make more effort to address these things in either Serato or Rekord box when making set lists, and double check the BPM is what it should be before I begin to use the set list.

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Answer 5

turingtest2

Level 10

277,729 points

Jun 5, 2025 07:25 AM in response to IsAppleLosingIt

It would depend on the source, but there seemed to be a thing for adding both a V1 and a V2.x tag to MP3 files at some point. Obviously the idea would be that you'd write the same data (as far as possible) to both tags and software that could only read one version would still work. That falls down if you have other software that can update the tags, but doesn't necessarily support multiple tags or necessarily work consistently across builds. What you could do next time you spot this issue is at least check to see if it is happening with an MP3 track, and if so try inspecting that file with a third party tag editor that can see if both V1 and V2 ID3 tags are present.

tt2

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Apple Music is changing the BPM of songs, not the tempo, the BPM...WHY?

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