Click a beat to change how it is played: accent → normal → quiet → silent. Silence is the useful one — muting beat 3 forces you to keep the bar yourself across the hole.
| Note value | Length | Rate |
|---|
The row in colour is the beat you are counting. These are the numbers you type into a delay pedal or a plug-in to make it land in time — a quarter-note delay is 60000 ÷ BPM milliseconds, and everything else follows from it.
A browser timer promises at least that long, never exactly that long. Each click is handed to the audio hardware in advance, stamped with its moment on the audio clock.
Each beat time is the last plus exactly 60 ÷ BPM seconds. Nothing is measured to produce it, so the error cannot build up.
Eighths at 90 BPM and quarters at 180 give the same clicks, but only one is the tempo on the page. The between-beat clicks are quieter: decoration on the pulse.
At 50% the halves are equal; at 66.7% the beat splits two-thirds/one-third, the triplet ratio most people mean by swing.
A metronome that drifts by two milliseconds a beat is out by two thirds of a beat after two minutes at 100 BPM (200 beats, 0.4 seconds against a 0.6-second beat): the difference between practising with a reference and practising with an opinion. The This run panel measures the scheduler’s wake-ups, which wander by several milliseconds, and the beat times, which do not wander at all.
Playing along with a click is a much easier skill than keeping time, and it is easy to spend years doing the first while believing you are doing the second. Two bars on and two off removes the crutch periodically and tells you the truth when it returns. A bar with only beat 1 clicking is harder to hold than it sounds.
Seven beats in a bar is not a feel; 3+2+2 is. Written as seven undifferentiated clicks a 7/8 is something to count; grouped, it becomes two long-short-short patterns your hands can learn. Type 2+2+3 and the same seven beats become a different piece of music.
Allegro is a character before it is a speed, the ranges overlap, and they have shifted over three centuries; Beethoven’s markings are famously argued about. The word shown is the conventional modern range.
Beat placement is exact against the audio clock, but the sound still travels through the operating system’s buffer, Bluetooth headphones or a speaker in another room. That delay is constant, so it shifts everything equally; it does mean recording against this click and expecting sample-accurate alignment is a mistake. Browsers also throttle background tabs, so leave this one visible.
Because a subdivision is not a faster tempo — it is a division of the beat you are already counting, and the difference matters when you read music. Eighth notes at 90 BPM and quarter notes at 180 BPM produce the same stream of clicks, but only one of them is the tempo written on the page. The clicks between beats are quieter here for the same reason: they are decoration on the pulse, not the pulse.
Moving the second half of each beat later. At 50% the two halves are equal and the feel is straight; at 66.7% the beat is split two-thirds/one-third, which is the same ratio as playing the first and third notes of a triplet and is what most people mean by swing. Past that it becomes a hard shuffle, and by 75% it is close to a dotted rhythm. The slider needs a two-part subdivision to be audible, because there is nothing to displace otherwise.
Because playing along with a click is a much easier skill than keeping time, and it is easy to spend years doing the first while believing you are doing the second. Two bars on, two bars off removes the crutch periodically and tells you the truth when it returns. Muting individual beats does the same thing at a smaller scale — a bar with only beat 1 clicking is a good deal harder to hold than it sounds.
Because seven beats in a bar is not a feel, and 3+2+2 is. Written as seven undifferentiated clicks a 7/8 is something to be counted; grouped, it becomes two long-short-short patterns your hands can learn. The grouping box sets the accents accordingly — type 2+2+3 and the same seven beats become a completely different piece of music.
Not really, and that is not a flaw in this page. Allegro is a character before it is a speed, the ranges overlap, and they have shifted over three centuries — Beethoven's markings are famously argued about. The word shown here is the conventional modern range and is offered as orientation, not as a definition.
That your device's audio clock runs at the rate it claims. Beat placement is exact against that clock, but the sound still travels through the operating system's output buffer, Bluetooth headphones, or a speaker in another room — each of which adds its own latency. That latency is constant, so it delays everything equally and does not affect timing between beats; it does mean that recording against this click and expecting sample-accurate alignment is a mistake. Browsers also throttle background tabs, so leave this one visible while it runs.
This page has changed in 121 archived releases, but each of those was a site-wide pass, so none is attributable to this tool on its own and none is listed here. That is not a claim that the tool never changed — a release that reworked many pages at once may well have altered this one too. The changelog has them.