Guide · Free tools inside
Find a song’s tempo by letting MagicBPM listen, tapping along, or counting the beats yourself. Choose whichever suits the way you’re listening.
Play the song out loud and let MagicBPM hear it. The BPM updates as the music plays. Tap Identify if you also want the song title. Best for anything you can play in the room.
Tap the beat with your finger or the spacebar and the average of your taps is the tempo. Works with headphones, with a song stuck in your head, and with music too quiet or too noisy to measure. Try it here.
Count the beats for 15 seconds and multiply by four for a quick estimate. Count for longer if you want a more precise result.
The quick way
MagicBPM listens through the microphone and reads the tempo off the room, so the source does not matter: a streaming app, a radio, a record, a rehearsal. You can keep your music playing while you measure it.
Listening through headphones? MagicBPM needs sound the microphone can hear. Use tap tempo while you listen, or play the music through a speaker.
Wherever it is coming from
The method is the same everywhere. What changes is the small print.
Play the track out loud and start listening. Spotify keeps playing throughout. The Spotify app does not show a track's tempo anywhere in its own interface, so measuring it in the room is the practical way to know.
Same, and once a song is identified you can open it straight back in Apple Music from the app. Play it on a speaker rather than through headphones, or the microphone has nothing to work with.
Works with anything on the page, including live sets, DJ mixes and lessons. On a laptop, put the phone next to the speakers. A mix that changes tempo shows up as the number moving, which is the point of the live reading.
All the same: the app is listening to the sound, not to the service. Any of them can also be your default for opening an identified song, set once under Open in.
Fine over a speaker. In a car, use the phone's own microphone rather than a hands-free Bluetooth route: those microphones apply voice processing that music recognition cannot see through, so song identification is deliberately switched off on them.
The reason for a real-time detector rather than a lookup. A band drifting a few BPM across a take, or a DJ riding the pitch fader, is exactly what the live tempogram is for.
There is no import step: play it out loud and point the phone at it. If it cannot be played out loud, tap along in the browser tap tempo tool instead.
Tap the rhythm on the pad. The average of your taps is the tempo, mistaps and all, and from there you can start the metronome at the number you tapped.
When answers disagree
Ask two people to tap along to a trap track and one taps 70, the other 140. Neither is wrong: the same pulse can be counted at half or double speed, and a lot of music is written to be felt both ways. That is why two apps, or an app and a producer's session file, can hand you different numbers for one song.
Three ways to settle it. Tap along yourself and see which count feels natural. Compare against a known tempo: 70 BPM and 140 BPM are the same music counted differently. Or, in MagicBPM, tap the half or double button to choose the tempo that matches your count.
If a reading keeps showing half or double the tempo you expect, narrowing the tempo range in Settings tells the detector where to look and usually settles it for good.
Free web tools
No download, no sign-up. Both run in this browser.
MagicBPM for Mac, iPhone, Android and Apple Watch
A dual-engine detector that hears music through the microphone and locks a BPM as the music plays, without pausing whatever is playing. Free, with a one-time Pro upgrade.
Good to know
Yes. Play the track out loud, from the same phone or from a speaker, and start listening in MagicBPM. It mixes into the audio session alongside Spotify rather than taking it over, so playback carries on while the BPM locks in. The same works for Apple Music, YouTube, Deezer, TIDAL, SoundCloud, radio, or a record on a turntable: the app is listening to the room, so it does not care what is producing the sound.
No. Keep the music playing through a speaker while MagicBPM listens through the microphone.
MagicBPM cannot hear music playing only through headphones. You can still measure the tempo by tapping along while you listen.
Play the file out loud on any speaker and let the app listen: there is no import step, and the app will estimate its tempo. If you cannot play it out loud, tap along with it and MagicBPM averages your taps into a BPM.
They may have counted the same pulse at half or double speed. A track written at 140 BPM with a half-time feel is 70 BPM to one listener and 140 to another, and both are describing the music correctly. In MagicBPM, the half and double buttons choose the tempo that matches your count.
Count the beats for 15 seconds and multiply by four for a quick estimate, or use the tap tempo tool on this site: tap the spacebar in time and it averages your taps as you go, with no download and no sign-up.
Still stuck on a track? Email [email protected] and tell us what it is.
