Guide Β· Free tools inside
Three ways that actually work, in the order most people should try them: let your phone listen while the track plays, tap the tempo in yourself, or count it by hand. Nothing here needs a subscription, and the last two need no app at all.
Play the song out loud and let MagicBPM hear it. The tempo appears in a few seconds and keeps updating as the track moves, and it can name the song while it is at it. 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. It is rough, within a few BPM, but it needs nothing at all and it is a good sanity check when a reading looks like it landed an octave away.
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. Two details make it more useful than it sounds.
Headphones are the one thing that cannot work. If the sound is going straight into your ears, the microphone has nothing to hear, and no app on any phone can get around that. Play the track out loud, even quietly, or tap the tempo in instead.
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 on the rail under the reading and it moves to the octave you meant and stays there.
If a reading keeps landing an octave away, 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 iPhone and Android
A dual-engine detector that hears music through the microphone and locks a BPM in seconds, 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. MagicBPM asks for a mixable audio session, so whatever is already playing keeps playing. Nothing is paused, ducked or interrupted while it listens.
No, and no app can: the microphone has nothing to hear, because the sound is going straight into your ears. Play the track out loud through a speaker instead, even a quiet one, or tap the tempo in by hand while you listen.
Play the file out loud on any speaker and let the app listen: there is no import step, and the reading is the same. If you cannot play it out loud, tap along with it and MagicBPM averages your taps into a BPM.
Usually because they picked different octaves of the same pulse. 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 on the rail under the reading move it to the octave you meant, and it stays there.
Count the beats for 15 seconds and multiply by four, which gets you within a few BPM, 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.
