Tap tempo
Tap the pad in time with any song, loop or heartbeat. After two taps you get a running tempo; after four or five it settles to within a beat or two of the real thing.
You can also tap with the space bar or the T key. If you stop for more than two seconds, the measurement starts over — that pause rule is what keeps an old tempo from contaminating a new one.
How the number is worked out
Each tap is timestamped. The tool averages the gaps between your most recent taps (up to the last eleven gaps) and converts the average gap to beats per minute: BPM = 60,000 ÷ average gap in milliseconds. Four taps exactly half a second apart give gaps of 500, 500 and 500 ms — an average of 500 ms, which is exactly 120 BPM. Human tapping is never that clean, which is why the average matters: one slightly early tap is cancelled by the next slightly late one, and by the fifth or sixth tap the reading is usually within ±1 BPM.
What to do with a BPM you found
Set a metronome to it. The button above carries the tempo into the MetronomeHQ metronome, saved in this browser, so you can immediately play along or practise the piece at — and then below — its real speed.
Convert it to delay time. Producers set echo and delay pedals in milliseconds, not BPM. A quarter-note delay at 120 BPM is 500 ms; the BPM to milliseconds converter gives you every note value, including dotted and triplet delays.
Name it. 120 BPM sits in Allegro on the scale this site uses. The tempo markings page shows all the Italian terms and their ranges — with the honest caveat that published scales disagree by a few BPM at the edges.
Check it against the genre. If your taps say 174 and the track feels like drum and bass, you are probably right. The genre BPM guide lists the typical ranges, from ballads around 60–75 to drum and bass at 160–180.
Tips for a clean reading
Tap on the beat you would nod to, not on every drum hit — in a lot of electronic music the kick is four-on-the-floor, but in rock the pulse is usually the snare on 2 and 4 with the count in between. If a song is in half-time (trap, some metal), your taps may land on half the notated tempo; double the reading if it feels implausibly slow. And if the number keeps wobbling, the performance may genuinely not be to a click — older recordings and live takes drift, and no average will fix a tempo that was never fixed.