MixMoose provides categories to analyze your Spotify playlist tracks, including BPM, energy, danceability, and key. This guide explains what the values mean and how they can help you choose and arrange tracks. Open the playlist editor to explore them in your own music.
Where do These Categories Come From?
MixMoose combines track information and audio features from Spotify with its own calculations. Tempo, energy, and key describe individual tracks. Categories such as BPM Transition compare neighboring tracks to help you explore how a playlist flows.
You can read more about the source values in Spotify's audio-feature reference. These values are useful starting points rather than rules about what belongs together. Estimates and available data can vary, so listen to the transitions before settling on an order.
Basic Categories
These categories describe a track on its own. Some come from Spotify's audio analysis, some are track metadata, and others are simple calculations based on those values.
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Acousticness | An estimate of how likely a track is to be acoustic. A higher value suggests a more acoustic sound. |
| Added At | The date the track was added to the playlist. |
| Bars per Minute | Tempo divided by the number of beats in a bar. For example, a track at 120 BPM with four beats per bar has 30 bars per minute. The result depends on the estimated tempo and time signature. |
| Danceability | An estimate of how suitable a track is for dancing, based on rhythm, beat strength, and tempo. A higher value suggests a steadier dance feel. It does not simply mean a faster song. |
| Duration | The length of the track. |
| Energy | An estimate of a track's intensity and activity. A loud, busy track may have high energy even when its tempo is relatively slow. |
| Explicitness | Indicates whether Spotify marks the track as explicit. Check the recording yourself when lyrical content matters, as versions and metadata can differ. |
| Instrumentalness | An estimate of how likely a track is to contain no vocals. Higher values suggest instrumental music rather than songs with lyrics. |
| Key | The estimated musical key, including whether it is major or minor. MixMoose uses uppercase notes for major keys and lowercase notes for minor keys. For example, A is A major and a is A minor. |
| Liveness | An estimate of whether a live audience is present in the recording. A higher value suggests a live performance. |
| Loudness | The overall loudness of a track in decibels. Values closer to zero are louder. This can help you spot tracks that may feel noticeably louder or quieter than their neighbors. |
| Open Key Notation | A numbered way to compare musical keys around the circle of fifths. Matching numbers and neighboring numbers can suggest compatible transitions. The numbers wrap around, so 12 and 1 are neighbors. |
| Popularity | Spotify's popularity score for the track, from 0 to 100. A higher score indicates greater popularity. Different recordings or releases of the same song can have different scores. |
| Release Date | The release date associated with the track's album. It may be precise only to a month or year. A remastered release can have a newer date than the original recording. |
| Speechiness | An estimate of how much spoken-word content a track contains. Higher values suggest speech, while intermediate values can include both speech and music. |
| Tempo | The estimated speed of the track in beats per minute (BPM). An estimate can sometimes feel like half or double the beat you hear, so listen before relying on the number alone. |
| Time Signature | The estimated number of beats in each bar. A value of 4 means four beats per bar. |
| Valence | An estimate of the musical mood conveyed by a track. Higher values suggest a brighter or more cheerful sound, while lower values suggest a darker or more subdued sound. It does not describe how every listener will feel. |
| Year | The year taken from the track's album release date. As with Release Date, this may describe a reissue rather than the original recording. |
Use these features to generate a Spotify playlist or arrange tracks with Flowify.
Advanced Categories
These categories compare tracks with their neighbors. Their values can change when you rearrange a playlist. Use them to find transitions worth checking, then try a different order in the playlist editor.
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Absolute Aggregate Change | Combines differences across several features of neighboring tracks. Higher values suggest a larger overall change, while lower values suggest more similarity. |
| Artist Genre Similarity | Compares the genre labels attached to the artists on neighboring tracks. Higher values suggest more similar labels. Sparse genre data can make this less informative, and artist genres do not always describe every song. |
| BPM Transition | Compares BPM with the previous track. Small changes lose little credit. Matching, half-time, and double-time tempos score equally. The first track and missing tempos show a dash. Later tracks do not affect this row's score. |
| DJ Compatibility | Averages harmonic fit and BPM fit from the previous track. Perfect harmony gets 100% harmonic credit, with energy levels 1, 2, and 3 getting 83⅓%, 66⅔%, and 50%. Energy up and down count equally. A No harmonic result gets no harmonic credit, but good BPM fit can still contribute up to 50% overall. The first track and missing metadata show a dash. Listen to the transition rather than treating the score as a promise of a good mix. |
| Exponential Aggregate Change | Uses the same feature comparisons as Absolute Aggregate Change, but gives larger differences more weight. This helps highlight transitions where one feature changes sharply. |
| Harmonic Transition | Key transition from the previous track, using Open Key notation. Perfect sits at zero. NRG arrows indicate one to three levels of energy up or down, plotted from -1 to +1. No means a move outside these rules. Missing keys and moves outside the rules leave chart gaps. Energy down is a direction, not a poor mix. |