Before the era of Genius playlists, Tangerine! ¹ was the one that ruled auto playlist generation on the Mac. Rather than iTunes’ extensive approach of collecting and analysing similar music tastes, Tangerine relies on judging similar tracks based on beats per minute and intensity. It is after all the same technique used by your average club DJ to play tracks in a sequence.

To start with, Tangerine will analyse your entire iTunes music library which takes time depending on how many songs you have in there. It says it goes through 3000 tracks in 20 minutes, but in my case the app acted buggy requiring me to constantly pause and resume the process. When it works, it’s runs through them pretty quick though.

To create a playlist, click the + button at the bottom, and the playlist generator will fly out. You basically adjust the beats per minute and beat intensity sliders to get to your final playlist. The generator also has options for patterns, ranging from random, to mountain slopes and other contours. To further customise your playlist, you can set some rules for the playlist. For instance, you might not want to have any Jack Johnson tracks in your workout playlist. Finally, enter the duration of the playlist, and you’re done.

It sure sounds like a lot more work than using the genius feature in iTunes, and it’s hard to say which one’s output is the better. One thing’s for sure, that both produce very different very different playlists (so Genius haters will love this one). You get a much more stable playlist than with Genius, which might pitch two popular tracks from different genres together. There’s also the fact that this works with tracks regardless of whether they are catalogued by the Genius bot, so it might generously includes any Hindi tracks in an alternative rock playlist.

It does have some shortcomings though, and that’s the quick refinements of a playlist. You have no idea what tracks the playlist is going to generate, and have no means of editing an existing playlist (save for manual drag and drop). And lastly, you have to be familiar with what BPM you’re looking for. There’s no way to just right click a song and use that as a starting point for creating a new playlist. You can read BPM and Beat Intensity in the window (export it to iTunes as well), but ultimately you’re back to the stone ages of counting numbers.

The one thing that’s hard to miss is the super slick user interface of Tangerine. Most of the times I’ve used it, I have listened to playlists within the Tangerine window itself. The Album artwork is neatly tiled across the ‘floor’, and are in variable size depending on the length of the song. Super sexy.

At $25 a license, it’s kind of expensive considering it’s competing with a free feature in iTunes. For people with less than 3,000 songs in their library, I’d say stick to Genius and be done with it. However, Tangerine will come in handy for those with extremely large libraries, spanning over music from different genres. Trial awaits.