BPM Tapper
← All toolsTap the pad along with whatever you're listening to and the tempo appears: the BPM is the average of the intervals between your last twelve taps, the same averaging the metronome's own Tap Tempo button does. The steadiness figure beside it is the standard deviation of those intervals, which is how you tell a tempo you actually found from one you only approximated.
BPM Tapper
Idle
—BPM
Tap at least twice.
Taps
—
Beat length
—
Steadiness
—
Your taps are the only thing that can make a sound here, and only with the click switched on.
How to use the BPM Tapper
- Tap the pad on the beat — twice gives you a number, eight or more gives you a tempo. The space bar taps too.
- Watch the steadiness reading: the smaller the ± milliseconds, the more your own taps agreed with each other.
- Press Send to the metronome to open the metronome with this tempo already loaded. Nothing plays there until you press Start.
- Pause for more than about two seconds and the next tap begins a fresh measurement, so two different songs never end up in one average.
FAQ
- How many taps do I need?
- Two taps give you one interval and therefore a number; eight give you a tempo. Every extra tap adds another interval to the average and the last twelve are kept, so a couple of bars of steady tapping settles the reading to within a fraction of a BPM.
- What is the steadiness figure?
- The standard deviation of the intervals between your taps, in milliseconds. At 120 BPM one beat is 500 ms, so ±10 ms means your taps agreed to within about two percent and the reading is real; ±80 ms means the number is an average of some fairly loose tapping rather than a tempo.
- Does it listen to my music?
- No — there is no microphone involved in this tool at all. It measures the timing of your own taps and nothing else. The only sound it can make is an optional click on each tap, which is switched off by default.
- Why does it reset when I stop?
- A gap of more than 2.2 seconds is treated as the end of a measurement rather than as one very slow beat. Without that rule, coming back after a pause would fold a long idle gap into the average and drag the tempo down with it.
