BPM tapper

Tap along to a beat and the tempo appears. The reading averages the last eight taps, so it settles within a bar or two and follows a tempo that drifts. Stop for a couple of seconds and the next tap starts a fresh measurement.

The two common mistakes both produce a confident wrong answer. Tapping the hi-hat instead of the beat gives exactly double the tempo, and tapping every other beat gives half — which is why a track that reads 174 might genuinely be 87, and why drum and bass at 174 and hip-hop at 87 feel related. If the number looks wrong by a factor of two, it almost certainly is, and the half-time and double-time rows exist to make that easy to spot.