FAQ



Why is that sometimes, when I create some moods playlists, they can be quite inaccurate?

The mood playlist generated for you is only as good as the songs you initially pick. If you select highly varying songs, Armadillo will make a decision that you want more variety of songs in your playlist and will select songs depending on this. This may not sum up your mood. We recommend that you think of similar songs to pick as your initial songs, especially if you’re not picking many to generate your playlist with, and then calculate a mood playlist from these. If you then want to add other songs to a playlist, add them after the first mood playlist generation and then ask Armadillo again to find similar songs for your updated playlist.



Some of my songs have inaccurate BPM fields, why is that?

A beat is a very human interpreted thing, so it’s very hard for a computer to determine sometimes. The method of beat detection we conceptualised ourselves takes the shortest amount of time to calculate, but is extremely precise in getting the top 5 most prevalent beats in a song. Our algorithm then makes an intelligent decision which of these to take as its value, and rarely, this happens to be an incorrect choice*. Please right-click the song and select ‘Edit Track’ and then ‘Manual Estimate’, or select through ‘Track’ -> ‘Manually Calculate BPM’ on the menu bar. From here you can click in time with the song to get a beat which you interpret to be the right value

* you’ll notice, an incorrect value calculated is often either exactly double or half of what you think it should be. Try tapping this beat and you’ll still be in time with the music- it’s not a wild value, it’s a beat of the song too!



It’s taking forever to import my huge music library, why’s it so slow?

You’d be astonished if you knew how many calculations were being performed per second on song import. Armadillo does all of these intense calculations on import so you don’t have to be bogged down when it comes to generating intelligent mood playlists. Think about it - after a hard day at work, when you’re feeling the most impatient and irritable, you just want to get home and relax listening to music that reflects your state of mind. A good mood analysis application should provide instant music, so you can get down to chilling or rocking out, whatever floats your boat. If it’s really running slow on your computer, and you’re already in an impatient and irritable mood, you can adjust how much of each song is analysed in ‘Edit’->‘Preferences’’ just set the level of mood analysis to a lower option. This should speed up analysis considerably but will come at the cost of less intensively analysed songs.



I’ve just experienced a bug in your program / Armadillo keeps crashing

We love Armadillo, but we know that it’s far from perfect. However, we’re so proud of what we’ve accomplished as developers that we are committed to repairing and improving Armadillo as much as we can with the resources available to us. We’ve implemented an error logger in Armadillo, so it’s easier for you to submit bug reports to us. Just find the log file in the Armadillo directory (systemlog.txt) and drop us an email at bugs[at]armadillomusic[dot]org . We’ll do our best to fix every bug for our impending next release!