Frequently asked questions

Yes — under the tap button. It picks up the tempo you tapped (or type one in, or nudge it by 1 BPM), with an accent on beat 1, time signatures 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/8 and 7/8, and optional eighth-note, triplet or sixteenth-note clicks. The clicks are timed by your browser’s audio clock, so they stay steady, and the screen stays on while it plays.

BPM stands for beats per minute — a measure of tempo, or how fast a piece of music is. A song at 120 BPM has 120 beats in every minute, evenly spaced.

It averages the interval between your last several taps rather than just the last two, so it settles down and gets more accurate the longer you tap along. Tap for at least 8–10 beats on a steady section of the song for a reading you can trust to within a fraction of a BPM. It shows a whole number with "Keep tapping…" while your taps still vary, and switches to one decimal with "Steady" once they agree within about 4%. If the reading is twice or half what you hear, use the ½× and 2× buttons; −1 and +1 nudge it, or type a tempo in. Focus mode turns the whole screen into the tap pad, and any key works too.

It varies by sub-genre and era, but as a rough guide: hip-hop usually sits around 80–110 BPM, house around 120–130 BPM, techno 120–150 BPM, and drum & bass 160–180 BPM. See the table above for more.

You can count beats for 15 seconds and multiply by 4, use a metronome and match it by ear, or check the track info in Spotify/Apple Music/DJ software if it lists one. See our full guide.

They convert your BPM into milliseconds for common note values — useful for setting a delay pedal, DAW plugin, or reverb pre-delay to lock in with the track. A quarter-note delay at 120 BPM is 500 ms, for example.