Online Metronome

An online metronome keeps the beat steady at the tempo you choose

A metronome gives a short click at even intervals so you have a fixed reference for the beat. Tempo is set in BPM (beats per minute), the number of beats in one minute. At 120 BPM it clicks 120 times a minute, once every 0.5 seconds. This tool lets you pick a whole-number tempo from 30 to 300 BPM, group a bar into 1 to 16 beats, and shows with sound and picture where the first beat comes back around.

It goes beyond a click that only marks the first beat: each beat can be set to strong, medium, normal or rest, so you can hear the 1 and 4 of 6/8 or the 2+2+3 grouping of 7/8 as written. The same screen also has subdivisions that split a beat in two, three or four, a tap button that finds a tempo from your taps, a map showing roughly how many BPM tempo markings such as Andante and Allegro cover, a practice mode that speeds up every few bars, and one that mutes a few bars at a time. There is nothing to install or sign up for, and only your chosen settings are kept in this browser.

When to turn a metronome on

Players rarely notice their own beat drifting. An outside reference that never wavers lets you hear where you rush and where you drag.

• Learning a new piece slowly: start well below the marked tempo, check that your fingers and the beat agree, and raise the tempo a little at a time. With Speed up turned on, the tempo rises by itself every set number of bars.
• Agreeing on a tempo before rehearsal or recording: if everyone sets the same BPM, there is less to argue about at the start. If you do not know the number, tap along with a recording to find it.
• Getting used to odd meters: in meters such as 5/8 and 7/8, where the beats are grouped unevenly, accenting the first beat of each group makes counting much easier.
• Building an inner pulse: with Mute bars on, a few bars pass without sound. When the click returns, it is immediately clear whether your beat still matches.
• Setting the pace for singing or walking: it also works anywhere you need a steady repetition, such as a choir's starting tempo or the steps per minute of a run. If one click equals one step, BPM is your steps per minute.

How to use it

1. Set the tempo by typing a BPM in the Tempo box, using the − and + buttons (hold to keep changing), or using the bars of the tempo marking map. Pressing a band on the map jumps to the middle of that marking's range.
2. Under Time signature, choose the number of beats per bar (1 to 16) and the note that gets one beat (half, quarter or eighth note). The wheel shows one dot per beat.
3. Under Accent groups, pick a grouping such as 3+3 or 2+2+3, or press the dots on the wheel to set each beat to strong, medium, normal or rest.
4. If you like, split each beat in two, three or four with Subdivision, and choose a sound and volume. Pressing a sound button plays it once.
5. Press Start. The progress arc goes around once per bar and the dot for the current beat lights up. On a keyboard, Space starts and stops and T taps (when no input box has focus).
6. To prop a phone or tablet on a music stand, press Full screen. While it is playing, the screen is kept from turning off (in browsers that support this).

BPM and the gap between beats

The gap between beats is 60 seconds divided by the BPM. Doubling the BPM halves the gap. The time one bar takes is the gap multiplied by the number of beats in the bar. The table below is calculated for 4/4 (four beats per bar).

A marking at the head of a score such as "M.M. quarter note = 100" is exactly this number. M.M. stands for Maelzel's Metronome, and the note picture tells you which note is counted as one beat. Britannica explains that the pendulum metronome was actually invented by the Dutchman Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, and that Johann Nepomuk Maelzel built and popularized it in 1815–16. Beethoven also used Maelzel's metronome. The same source reads "M.M. half note = 60" as 60 swings per minute, with the half note receiving one beat.

Time signatures and accent groups

The top number of a time signature is the number of beats in a bar, and the bottom number is the note that gets one beat. This tool counts each click as the note given by the bottom number: every quarter note in 4/4, every half note in 2/2, every eighth note in 6/8. The "note = BPM" label in the middle of the screen tells you which note one click stands for. (US note names are used here; in British usage, a quarter note is a crotchet, an eighth note a quaver and a half note a minim.)

Open Music Theory calls a meter whose beats divide into two simple, and one whose beats divide into three compound, and says that a compound meter with the dotted quarter note as the beat has 8 as its bottom number. That is why 6/8 is normally felt not as six eighth notes but as two dotted quarter notes, that is, two big beats. If you choose 6/8 here, the accent grouping is set to 3+3, so beat 1 is strong and beat 4 is medium, and the tempo of the big beat (dotted quarter note = BPM ÷ 3) is shown in the middle as well.

Groupings vary from piece to piece. Even in 7/8, some pieces are written 2+2+3 and others 3+2+2, so choose by looking at the slurs or the beams within the bar. For a grouping that is not in the list, press the dots on the wheel to build it. Each press changes a dot in the order normal → medium → strong → rest, and after rest it goes back to normal. A beat set to rest loses only its beat click; if subdivision is on, the soft clicks inside that beat still sound.

Subdivision: splitting a beat in two, three or four

At slow tempos the gap between beats is long, and the rhythm can wobble in between. Turning on subdivision adds soft clicks between the beat clicks to mark positions inside the beat. Subdivision does not change the tempo of the beat. At 120 BPM with four subdivisions, the beat still arrives every 0.5 seconds, and three extra soft clicks fit in between.

Subdivision is also useful when you want to count a compound meter in big beats. To hear only the big beat of "dotted quarter note = 60" in 6/8, switch to 2/4, enter 60 BPM and turn on subdivision in three. To hear every eighth note as a beat, enter 180 BPM in 6/8. Both methods give the same speed.

Roughly how many BPM is a tempo marking?

Scores often carry only a marking such as Andante or Allegro, with no number. The table below is the list in Wikipedia's "Tempo" article, which states that its values are very rough ones for 4/4 and vary greatly with the composer and the work. That is also why some ranges overlap. A marking expresses the character of a piece as well as its speed, so use the numbers only as a starting point.

The tool's tempo marking map draws ten of these as bands, leaving out Lento and Larghetto. Overlapping ranges are placed on separate rows, and the band containing the current tempo turns darker. Boundary values are counted by the ranges above. For example, 120 BPM is both the end of Moderato (108–120) and the start of Allegro (120–156), and the map shows it as Allegro. Some words have also changed meaning over time. According to the same source, Allegretto meant a tempo a little faster than Andante in the 18th century, but from the 19th century it came to mean a tempo a little slower than Allegro.

Practicing with Speed up and Mute bars

Speed up starts from the current tempo, raises it by a set amount every set number of bars, and holds the tempo once it reaches the target. If you enter a target lower than the current tempo, it slows down instead. Stopping returns to the starting tempo, so you can repeat the same exercise from the beginning as often as you like. The staircase drawing on the card shows the tempo at each step, and the summary line shows the number of bars and the time needed to reach the target. The examples below are calculated in 4/4.

The bigger the step, the sooner you reach the target, but the more likely it is that your hands fall behind at some step. One way to use it is to keep steps small, such as 2 to 5 BPM every 4 to 8 bars, note the tempo where things fall apart, and next time start a little below that point. This is just one way of organizing practice, not a teaching rule that suits everyone.

Mute bars alternates heard bars and silent bars. With 2 bars heard and 2 silent, bars 1 and 2 sound, bars 3 and 4 pass without sound, and the sound returns at bar 5. During silent bars the dots on the wheel and the progress arc keep moving and the middle shows "Silent bar 1/2". Count in your head without looking, and listen for whether your beat matches when the sound comes back. Start with 1 silent bar and lengthen it as it gets comfortable.

How tap tempo is calculated

If you press the Tap button (or the T key) several times in time with the beat, the tempo is set from the average of the last nine presses, that is, eight gaps. If the gaps are 0.5 seconds each, the result is 120 BPM. The first press has no gap yet, so it only shows "Tap again", and the tempo starts changing from the second press. If you pause for more than 2 seconds and then press again, it measures anew without mixing in the earlier taps. It measures the moment of pressing, not the moment you lift your finger, so just press in time with the beat.

Press once per beat. If you press only on the first beat, you get a quarter of the real tempo in 4/4. If you tap faster than 300 BPM the tempo is set to 300, with a note on the status line. A gap of more than 2 seconds between taps, which is slower than 30 BPM, starts a new measurement, so slower tempos cannot be tapped.

How accurate are the sound and the display?

A common way to make steady sound in a browser is to play each sound from a timer, but timers can be delayed by drawing or other work. As Chris Wilson describes in his web.dev article "A tale of two clocks" (2013), this tool uses a short timer to look a little ahead and schedules sounds in advance on the Web Audio clock. That article suggests a 25 millisecond interval looking 100 milliseconds ahead as a starting point, and this tool schedules up to 0.12 seconds ahead every 25 milliseconds. The beat gap is set on the audio clock at exactly 60 ÷ BPM.

When you switch to another tab, Chrome can batch the timers of a hidden tab to once per second. The Chrome developer blog explains that pages that have played sound within the last 30 seconds are only lightly limited, but this tool schedules up to 1.5 seconds ahead in a hidden tab so the beat does not break even if the timer runs a second late. The dots and the progress arc move to match the audio time the output device is currently emitting (getOutputTimestamp), so they light up later than the scheduled time, closer to when you actually hear the sound.

Even so, the moment sound reaches your ear can be delayed by the operating system and the audio device. Bluetooth earphones tend to have large delays, and some devices do not report that delay fully to the browser. If the picture and sound seem out of step, compare with wired earphones or the device speaker, and use wired output when the metronome is the reference for ensemble playing or recording. Keep the volume just loud enough to hear. The WHO advises that adults can safely listen at 80 dB for up to 40 hours a week, and that at 90 dB this drops to 4 hours a week.

Common mistakes

• Entering 60 for "dotted quarter note = 60" in 6/8: the click in 6/8 is an eighth note here, so 60 makes it three times too slow. Enter 180, or to hear only the big beat use 2/4 at 60 BPM with subdivision in three. In 6/8 the big-beat tempo is shown in the middle too, so check that it matches the score.
• Counting a 2/2 score in quarter notes: for a piece marked "half note = 60", entering 60 with a quarter-note beat gives one click per second on each quarter note, which plays the piece at half speed. Change the beat note to a half note, or enter 120 on the quarter-note basis.
• Thinking subdivision made it faster: subdivision only adds sounds between beats and leaves the tempo of the beat unchanged. If you count the soft clicks as beats, you will play two or three times too fast.
• Tapping only on the first beat of the bar: tap once per beat. If you tap only on the first beat, the tempo comes out slower by the number of beats in the bar.
• Mistaking Bluetooth delay for a tempo problem: if the tempo is right but the sound consistently arrives late, that is output delay. Changing the BPM will not fix it, so compare with a different output device.

Limitations

• The tempo is a whole number from 30 to 300 BPM, the number of beats is 1 to 16, and the beat note is a half, quarter or eighth note. A meter whose beat is a sixteenth note (such as 7/16) has to be counted in eighth notes instead.
• Subdivision is limited to two, three or four, and it applies equally to the whole bar. There is no swing, quintuplet, different subdivision per beat, or polyrhythm that layers two rhythms.
• The tempo marking ranges are rough values from a Wikipedia list and are not a standard for deciding the real tempo of a work.
• The display follows the output time reported by the browser, but it can drift from the sound on devices such as Bluetooth that do not report their full delay. For precise recording sync, use the click of a DAW.
• If you lock the screen on a phone or switch to another app, the browser may stop the sound. If there is no sound when you come back, press Stop and then Start again.
• If a tab stays hidden for more than 5 minutes after being silent for more than 30 seconds, for example with Mute bars, Chrome can batch the hidden tab's timers to once a minute, and the beat may break.
• Only the settings (tempo, meter, accents, sound and practice values) are saved in this browser; no practice time or history is kept. There is no reference tone for tuning.

Sources

As of the sources below were checked against the originals on 23 October 2026. The beat gaps, bar times and Speed up times in the tables were calculated with this tool's formulas (beat gap = 60 ÷ BPM; for each step, bars × beats × beat gap, summed).

• 01Encyclopaedia Britannica — MetronomeWinkel's invention and Maelzel's manufacture (1815–16), Beethoven's use, the meaning of "M.M."
• 02Wikipedia — TempoList of tempo markings and approximate BPM (for 4/4, varying greatly by work), the change in meaning of Allegretto
• 03Open Music Theory — MeterSimple and compound meter, and the bottom number 8 when the dotted quarter note is the beat
• 04Chris Wilson (2013), A tale of two clocks — web.devLooking ahead with a timer and scheduling sounds on the audio clock (25 ms interval, 100 ms ahead)
• 05Chrome for Developers — Heavy throttling of chained JS timers beginning in Chrome 88One-second batching of hidden-tab timers, the exception for pages that play sound, the 30-second silence and 5-minute hidden conditions
• 06MDN Web Docs — AudioContext.getOutputTimestamp()The audio time the output device is currently emitting
• 07WHO — Deafness and hearing loss: Safe listeningAdults: 80 dB for 40 hours a week, 90 dB for 4 hours a week

Frequently asked questions

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