BPM Finder

A BPM finder measures how fast a song is and gives you the answer in beats per minute — the number of times you would tap your foot in sixty seconds. DJs use it to beatmatch, dancers and runners use it to pick tracks at the right speed, and musicians use it to set a metronome before practising along.

Drop your MP3, WAV, M4A or MP4 file into the box above and the tempo appears in a couple of seconds, along with the half-time and double-time values. If you would rather count it yourself, or you only have the song playing on a speaker, use the tap tempo button underneath and tap along with the beat.

The track is scanned for onsets — the small bursts of energy that mark a kick, a snare or a chord landing. That gives a pulse curve, and the analyser looks for the spacing at which the curve repeats most convincingly, leaning on the low frequencies where the drums live. The winning spacing, converted to beats per minute, is your tempo.

Because both readings are musically defensible. A track with hi-hats on every eighth note pulses twice as often as you would tap, so a naive counter reports double. KeyPitch weighs the accents to pick the level a human would clap at, and shows the half-time and double-time values underneath so you can take the one that suits your use.

On anything with a steady beat — dance, pop, rock, hip hop — it lands within a fraction of a BPM. Live recordings that drift, rubato ballads, free jazz and tracks that change tempo mid-way are genuinely harder; there the tap tempo tool is often the better answer.

As a rough guide: ballads sit around 60–80 BPM, hip hop 80–100, reggaeton about 90, pop 100–130, house and techno 120–130, trance around 138, dubstep 140 and drum and bass around 174. These are conventions rather than rules, and plenty of hits sit deliberately outside them.

Tap tempo turns your own sense of the beat into a number: hit the button in time with the music and the average of your taps becomes the BPM. Four taps give a usable figure, eight or more a reliable one. It is the right tool for live music, for a song playing somewhere you cannot upload, and for double-checking an automatic reading.

Yes — that is what the Speed Changer above the FAQ is for. Pick it and your file opens in the Audio Studio, where the speed slider takes the track from ×0.25 to ×4. To reach a target tempo, divide it by the detected one: a 120 BPM track at ×1.07 lands on roughly 128 BPM.

Not in the KeyPitch studio. On a turntable, speeding a record up raises everything with it — that is why sped-up edits sound like chipmunks. KeyPitch time-stretches instead, so the tempo moves while the key stays exactly where it was. If you do want the key to move, that is a separate control in semitones.

Beatmatching means bringing two records to the same tempo so their beats land together. Knowing each track's BPM before you play tells you which ones sit close enough to blend, and how far you would have to push a deck to bridge the gap. Add the musical key on top and you get harmonic mixing, where the two tracks agree melodically as well.

Most runners land between 150 and 180 steps per minute, so tracks in that range — or at half of it, where you step on every other beat — keep you in rhythm. Walking suits 110–130, cycling and rowing usually 130–150. Find a song you like, check its BPM here, then nudge it with the speed slider to match your target.

MP3, WAV, M4A and MP4 files up to 50 MB and 10 minutes work, and the BPM finder is completely free with no account needed. Your file never leaves your computer: the analysis runs inside your browser, so nothing is uploaded to a server.