BPM counter

Song BPM: how to find the BPM of a song with your phone

BPM, beats per minute, is how many beats fall in sixty seconds: 60 BPM is one a second, 120 is two, and one beat lasts 60,000 ÷ BPM milliseconds. Play the song on a speaker, a laptop or a second phone, tap Listen and hold this phone a hand's width or two from the speaker, not pressed against it. A part with drums is easiest. As a beat counter it reads the sound a hundred times a second and marks every moment the spectrum suddenly gets louder: a kick, a snare, a hat. Every quarter second it looks at the last eight seconds of those marks for the gap that repeats best. A number shows once four beats sit on that grid, and it locks after eight, when the readings of the last two seconds agree within one and a half percent.

After the lock the tempo is the line through the beats themselves, which is why it reads to a tenth of a BPM. You see the confidence, the range it measured, one bar of history for every bar of music, half and double time, and a table of delay, pre-delay, LFO and gate times for the tempo, straight, dotted and triplet. A quarter note is 500 ms at 120, 468.75 at 128. Up to eight bars after the lock, or after 40 seconds at most, the microphone closes by itself, and nothing it heard is kept.

BPM by tapping, when the microphone can't hear it

On headphones, in a loud bar or for a song in your head, tap the pad under Listen on every beat, with a finger, or with Space, Enter or T once the pad has focus. The number follows your last four taps; after eight taps, pause, and the average of all of them is the result, with its confidence: how even your taps were. That average is the time from the first tap to the last divided by the number of gaps, so a longer run is more exact. With every tap within 20 ms of the beat, eight taps at 120 BPM land within about 1.4 BPM, sixteen within 0.6. The tap tempo page does only this, with a click afterwards to check it against.

Find the BPM of an MP3 or another song file

Tap the file button under the pad and choose a song, or drop the file on the counter: WAV, MP3, M4A and AAC, FLAC, and most other formats your browser can play. The same beat tracker reads it in this tab, much faster than it plays, from the start until the tempo has locked and held for eight bars, at most the first three minutes. Nothing is uploaded: the file never leaves your phone or laptop. A file has no room noise and is read much faster than it plays, so the answer comes in a second or two; a long intro without drums only makes it read further. It reads one song at a time and writes nothing into the file.

How accurate is the BPM counter?

Tested on 96 loops made from Brumm's drum and instrument samples, six styles from four on the floor to breakbeats and hats alone, 70 to 178 BPM, each played through a simulated room and a phone's microphone with noise: it locked on 95, after 4 seconds in the middle. 76 locked on the loop's own tempo, 19 on half or double it, none on any other tempo, and every locked number was within 0.07 BPM of the true one. Twelve takes of plain room noise and of chords without a beat showed no number at all.

The benchmark page is a second run on another set, every 5 BPM from 90 to 175: 108 loops, 103 on their own tempo, 5 on half or double, none wrong (measured 2026-10-28). Both rooms are simulated; a real speaker, a loud bar or a phone's own sound processing can do worse. The test is part of this page's own check, and the check fails if the numbers above stop matching it.

70 or 140? Half time and double time

Most beats can be counted two ways. Drum and bass runs at 160 to 180 BPM with its snare on every other beat, so the same track also counts at half, 87 for a track at 174. A trap or dubstep beat at 140 with the snare on beat three feels like 70; a boom-bap beat at 90 with busy hats can pass for 180. When two readings an octave apart fit the beats about equally, the counter leans to the one nearer 120, and puts half and double time beside it, outlined when the beats fit them nearly as well. A tap on one switches the number, the times and the door. Take the one your DAW's grid, your chart or the next record in the set counts. BPM counts beats, not bars: a song in 4/4 and one in 3/4 at 120 both have 120 beats a minute; the time signature only groups them. In 6/8 the beat people nod to is usually the dotted quarter, three eighths long.

When it can't hear the beat

Music without drums, a song that speeds up and slows down, a live band in a big hall, heavy swing or a beat that dodges the one, or a quiet speaker next to people talking: the counter then says it heard no beat or couldn't lock, rather than guess. Move closer, pick a part with drums, or tap it. For a song on YouTube or Spotify, play it on another device or a speaker and hold the phone to that. A song that changes tempo has more than one BPM: measure the verse and the chorus on their own.

Is 120 BPM fast or slow?

Neither: 120 BPM is the middle. It is two beats a second, 500 ms a beat, the step rate of a brisk walk, and inside the 120 to 130 BPM where most music's tempo clusters and where listeners most often put the beat when they tap along to a song (Moelants, 2002). In the Italian tempo words it is where moderato ends and allegro begins; in a club it is house tempo, at the slower end of the 115 to 130 house runs at. As rough bands: under 80 BPM sounds slow, 80 to 110 medium, 110 to 130 brisk, above 130 fast. Techno sits at 125 to 135, drum and bass at 160 to 180. Hip hop sits at 85 to 95 (hip-hop BPM), recent pop at 80 to 104 (pop BPM), reggaeton around 90 (reggaeton BPM), trance at 130 to 150 (trance BPM). Every genre here on one axis, with your tempo marked: the BPM chart.

Is 70 BPM a slow tempo?

Counted as 70, yes: 857 ms a beat, adagio territory, a ballad or a slow jam. But a lot of trap and dubstep that feels like 70 is counted at 140 in the studio, because the hats and the grid run at 140 and the snare lands only on beat three. Lo-fi at 70 is simply 70 (lo-fi BPM). The number is slow; whether the track feels slow depends on what plays between the beats.

Grave, adagio, allegro: the tempo words in BPM

Sheet music often names a tempo in Italian instead of a number. The ranges below are the ones metronome makers usually print; they differ by a few BPM from one maker to the next, and a piece marked allegro sits where the music sits. The last column is one beat at each end of the range. The number on a score, ♩ = 120 or M.M. 120, goes back to Maelzel's metronome, patented in 1815.

Which BPM finder is best?

The one that fits what you have. Every automatic counter, this one included, can land on half or double the tempo, so check its number against a few taps.

Google's own metronome (search "metronome") plays a tempo you set; it doesn't listen or count one, so it can't give you a song's BPM.

Logic Pro's BPM Counter

Logic Pro has a plug-in called BPM Counter, under Metering. Put it on a track and play: it listens for transients and shows the tempo from 80 to 160 BPM to one decimal; its LED flashes while it measures and turns solid once it has a tempo (Apple's Logic Pro user guide, as of 2026). Outside that range a tempo can only show as its half or double, so drum and bass at 174 reads as 87. To make a project follow a recording instead, Smart Tempo, in Logic since version 10.4 (2018), analyses the audio and writes a tempo map. In Ableton Live, warping a clip makes the same kind of guess at its tempo.

Abyssmedia BPM Counter

Abyssmedia's BPM Counter is a free program for Windows 7 to 11: point it at a folder and it analyses every MP3 and WAV in it and can write the BPM into each MP3's ID3v2.3 tag, an option that is off by default (abyssmedia.com, October 2026). For a DJ library on a PC that is the right tool. This page does one song at a time, in any phone's or laptop's browser, and installs and writes nothing.

How to count BPM without a tool

Start a timer, count the beats for 15 seconds and multiply by four. One beat miscounted puts you 4 BPM off; count 30 seconds and double it for 2 BPM, a full minute for 1. Count the kick or the pulse you nod to, not the hats, and call the beat you start the timer on zero, not one.

A BPM counter for heart rate

A pulse is counted in beats per minute too, but a phone's microphone held in the air doesn't hear it, so Listen won't find one. Tap the pad with each beat you feel at the wrist or the neck, eight taps or more, and the number is your pulse in BPM. The American Heart Association gives 60 to 100 as the usual resting rate for adults. This page reads music; for anything about your health, ask a doctor.

For a running or workout playlist, measure each track here and match its BPM to your steps per minute; count your steps for 15 seconds and multiply by four, the same arithmetic as above.

A BPM counter app, without the app store

There is nothing to install and no account: the page runs in the phone's browser. To keep it one tap away, add it to the home screen: in Safari on an iPhone, the Share button, then Add to Home Screen; in Chrome on Android, the ⋮ menu, then Add to home screen. Once you have the number, the metronome plays it back, and the DJ tools page has the rest.

Then make something of it

The door opens Brumm at your tempo, halved or doubled until it sits between 90 and 150 BPM, the range the app plays: a club track with a beat and a bass. No account, no upload: the tempo is part of the link. Hum a line over it, and it becomes an instrument.