Find the tempo of a song in beats per minute. Tap the TAP button on each beat, or press Start mic and hold your device near the music for 10seconds. It reads the whole recording before it answers, so one stray hit can't throw the number off.
BPM (beats per minute) is a song's tempo: how many beats fall in one minute. At 60 BPM you hear one beat per second, at 120 BPM two. Once you know a song's BPM you can set a metronome to match and practise its groove at full speed or slower.
Tap the TAP button on every beat and the tempo appears from your second tap, settling as you keep going. Or press Start mic, hold your phone or laptop near the speaker and let it listen for 10 seconds. You get one BPM number with a confidence rating.
If the two methods disagree, tap again and go with the number you can comfortably count along to.
Both give you a BPM, but they suit different situations.
It records 10 seconds of audio, marks every moment where the sound changes sharply, and measures how often that pattern repeats. Drum hits, strums and note attacks all show up as those sharp changes (the technical name is spectral flux).
To find the repeat, it compares the recording with time-shifted copies of itself, a method called autocorrelation. The shift where the two line up best is the length of one beat, and the BPM is how many of those beats fit in a minute. Working on the whole recording at once means a single ghost note or messy bar can't drag the answer around.
The audio is analysed on your device, inside the browser. It's never uploaded or saved.
Tap the pulse you'd count as 1, 2, 3, 4. In most rock and pop that's where the kick and snare land, with the snare on 2 and 4. Don't tap along with the hi-hat: if it's playing eighth notes you'll get double the tempo. If you're not sure where the beat is, the guide to counting drum beats walks through it.
The detector uses your taps from the last four seconds and, once you've tapped enough, goes with the interval that comes up most often, so one early or late tap doesn't spoil it. Pause for more than four seconds and your next tap starts a new reading.
Because many songs can honestly be counted at two speeds. A track at 140 BPM played with a half-time groove, where the snare only lands on beat 3, feels like 70. When both tempos fit the recording about equally well, the microphone picks the faster one. If you count the song at half the number shown, halve it.
Tapping works the same way: tap every other beat and you'll get half the tempo. Very slow taps, under 50 BPM, are doubled automatically.
Give the microphone a section where the beat is obvious, and check the confidence rating afterwards. High means the pattern repeated cleanly. Low means it found a likely tempo without much agreement, so confirm it by tapping.
Set the metronome to that tempo, or program the groove in the drum sequencerat the song's BPM and play along with it. Start well below the song's tempo and move up only when the groove is clean. The guide to practising with a metronome explains how to pick those steps.
Yes. It runs in your browser with no account and nothing to install.
No. The microphone audio is analysed on your device, inside the browser, and is never uploaded or stored.
Ten seconds. It needs at least four seconds of usable audio to give a reading, so keep the music playing for the whole window.
The microphone reads 50 to 220 BPM. Tap tempo reads 50 to 200 BPM, and taps outside that range are doubled or halved to fit it.
It reads best on music with a steady beat and clear drums, and shows a High, Medium or Low confidence rating so you know when to double-check by tapping. Background noise, music that changes speed and very busy rhythms make the reading less reliable.
Many songs can be counted at two tempos, for example 140 BPM or a half-time 70 BPM. When both fit about equally well the detector picks the faster one, so halve or double the number to match how you count the song.
The browser has usually blocked microphone access for the site, the device has no microphone, or the page isn't on a secure connection. Allow the microphone in your browser's site settings, or use the TAP button, which always works.