Several months ago, I bought an iPod shuffle with the Nike+ attachment. At the time I was using it to help improve my running performance. I’d go out, track my time, my pace, etc. and slowly I was able to improve my performance. It worked really well for that.One of the challenges I had was figuring out how to come up with a good playlist while I was exercising. Finding and listing music you like is easy enough with iTunes. You can just make a smart playlist based on your ratings or based on some other criteria like music type, play count or whatever. Unfortunately, not all my music (that’s good for exercising) is the same genre and not all my favorite songs are good for exercising. For example, Why Worry by Dire Straits is an awesome song but can you imagine running to it? You’d end up laying on the grass taking a nap or trying to figure out what that cloud looks like.After a lot of playing around, I’m getting a lot closer to finding/creating some good playlists but what I’ve discovered is that this requires a little bit of automation and a lot of trial and error.One of the first things I did was to download BeaTunes and Tangerine (I use an iMac for stuff like this, not my PC). After playing with both apps, I decided I liked Tangerine better and bought it. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty good software.Once I analyzed my library and added the bpm value to all my songs, I created a smart playlist based on bpm. My “walking” playlist was any song that has a bpm between 115 and 180 (I made a wide range to start with).That got me pretty close to a nice playlist but it is still a bit odd. When I put that list on shuffle, I’d find myself going from a song like Your Latest Trick by Dire Straits (bpm = 125) straight to Enter Sandman by Metallica (bpm = 124). Both good songs but makes for a really odd transition when you’re walking along a path or on a treadmill.I’ve finally pared down my list of songs to a few that I like to listen to while walking. My intention is to end up with about 60 minutes worth of music so I can go for a 30-60 minute walk, put it on shuffle and be surprised with music that works well for walking and that I like.So far, my list includes:Still a work in progress, but it’s good for now. Every once in a while I put the iPod on shuffle, when I find a song I like, I add it to the On-the-go playlist and update my walking playlist later.As a side note, using Tangerine to analyze your BPM info is easy but can often require some tuning. It sometimes cuts the BPM in half or doubles it. Fortunately, it offers two menu options (double and half bpm) to make those quick changes. It also offers a little metronome type feature. You bring it up, play the song and start clicking on the pad with the beat of the music. After a while, it figures out what the bpm is based on your “tapping” and saves that. Nice feature.