BPM Counter
BPM counter with two ways to get an answer: analyze an audio file, or tap the beat out yourself. File detection always lands between 90 and 180 BPM.
Tempo
The half and the double
Audio clip
Drop an audio clip here
MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC · ten to thirty seconds with a steady beat is plenty · nothing is uploaded
Works best on a clip with a steady beatTen to thirty seconds is plenty, and the analysis runs on your device. Switch to Tap tempo and tap along if you have no file to hand.
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How to use
- Drop a clip into the Audio clip box with From file chosen, then press Detect BPM. The button stays greyed out until a file is actually in there.
- Counting by ear instead? Choose Tap tempo and the focus moves to the pad; tap it, or press any letter or the spacebar, on the strong beats.
- Reset wipes the run. Two taps is the minimum before any figure shows up at all, since the pad measures the gaps rather than the taps, and a pause longer than twice your usual gap starts a fresh run on its own.
About this tool
Two ways to read a tempo live behind the same BPM counter, and they are good at opposite things. Load a clip, press Detect BPM, and the analyser works it out for you, to a tenth of a beat, with the milliseconds per beat and where the first beat lands. Switch to Tap tempo and the pad takes the focus: tap it, or press any key, and the figure firms up as you go. Both readings stay on the one strip, the file's answer right beside your own.
The file side has one quirk worth knowing before you trust a number. It runs the audio through a 240 Hz low-pass first, so it is really following the kick and the bass rather than the whole mix, and it then folds every candidate tempo into a 90 to 180 BPM window by doubling or halving. A 75 BPM ballad comes back as 150. A 200 BPM hardcore track comes back as 100. The tap pad has no such window and will happily report 62 or 196, and the half and the double of whatever the strip shows sit right under it, one press away.
I reach for it most when I am lining two tracks up for a playlist and want to know whether they are anywhere near each other. Other people use it to set a metronome, to pick a running cadence, to sanity-check a track before a remix, or to cut a video on the beat. Any of those only needs a number.
Reading the tempo is where it stops. To actually stretch a track to a different speed, the Audio Speed Changer is the tool you want, and the Tone Generator will give you a steady pulse to tap against.
Before you trust the number
- Automatic detection cannot report anything below 90 or above 180 BPM. Everything outside that window gets doubled or halved until it fits.
- The 240 Hz low-pass means a sparse arrangement with no kick and no bass line gives it very little to grab. You get a 'couldn't detect a steady tempo' message rather than a wrong answer, which is at least honest.
- A song that speeds up or slows down comes back as one averaged figure. There is no map of where the tempo moved.
- The tap figure averages your last eight gaps, so one late tap moves it for a few beats rather than for good. Stop for a moment and the run starts over.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the detected BPM exactly half or double what I am hearing?
Because the analyzer is set to a 90 to 180 BPM window and octave-folds anything outside it. A slow 70 BPM ballad has its tempo doubled to 140 before you ever see it, and a 190 BPM track gets halved to 95. Both are the same tempo musically, so pick whichever multiple matches the way you count the track.
How many taps before the tap reading settles?
Two gets you a figure, because the pad needs one gap to measure. It averages your last eight gaps, so a couple of bars of steady tapping is usually where the number stops jumping around, and the strip shows how far apart your quickest and slowest gaps ran. Tap the downbeats rather than every eighth note or you will read double.
Will it open an M4A off my phone, or do I need to convert it first?
The picker takes anything the browser reports as audio, and decoding is handed straight to the browser's own audio decoder, so M4A, MP3 and WAV go in as they are. FLAC works in Chrome. A file that refuses to decode gives you an error rather than a wrong reading, and converting it to WAV clears that up.
The tap pad and the file detection disagree. Which do I believe?
Check whether they are octaves apart first, because 74 against 148 is one tempo counted two ways and neither is wrong; the strip keeps both readings and says so when they are. If they genuinely differ, go with the pad. You are hearing the beat that the low-pass and the peak-picking are struggling with, and for swung or live material that gap is real.
Should I trim the track before running detection?
It reads whatever you give it end to end, so a seven-minute file takes longer than a chorus does. The hint under the picker suggests 10 to 30 seconds and that really is enough. Cutting a quiet intro or an ambient outro also stops those stretches pulling the estimate around. Audio Cutter will do the trim.
Why is the Detect BPM button greyed out?
It is disabled until there is a file in the Audio clip box, and it disables itself again while a detection is running, with the label switching to Detecting, so you cannot start two at once. If a drag and drop leaves it grey, the drop did not land; click the field and pick the file instead.
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