🎼Online metronome

✓ Tested & verified Updated: Aug 11, 2026 How this works

Metronome

100BPM

Moderato

Tempo

Beats per bar Subdivision

Beat every—
One bar—

Try also

Why do online metronomes drift?

The TimerPlan metronome sounds each click at a time booked in advance on the audio clock, which is why it does not wobble — the usual approach, firing a click from a repeating JavaScript timer, is at the mercy of whatever else the browser is doing. Those timers are allowed to arrive late: by a few milliseconds while a page is busy, and by a full second once the tab is in the background.

At 120 beats per minute a beat is 500 milliseconds, so a few milliseconds of jitter is audible as unsteadiness — the one fault a metronome cannot have.

The fix is the pattern Web Audio was designed for. A plain timer runs in the background doing nothing but looking a fraction of a second ahead and scheduling any clicks due in that window at exact times. The sound is then placed by the audio hardware, and the flashing lights follow the audio clock too, so eye and ear agree.

Tempo markings, and the ranges they usually mean:

Marking	BPM	Feel
Largo	40–60	Broad, slow
Adagio	60–76	Slow, at ease
Andante	76–108	Walking pace
Moderato	108–120	Moderate
Allegro	120–156	Fast, bright
Vivace	156–176	Lively
Presto	176+	Very fast

One beat at 60 BPM is exactly one second, which is the number worth remembering: everything else is 60 000 divided by the tempo in milliseconds, and the page shows that figure so you can check a delay setting or a video edit against it.

To read a tempo back from something already playing, use the BPM counter — the same tap logic with more taps and a steadiness reading. For practice sessions rather than beats, the pomodoro timer counts the rounds, the stopwatch times the repeats, and the count-up timer counts towards an hour of playing.

Frequently asked questions

How steady is it really?

Steady to well under a millisecond between clicks, because the spacing is computed in audio-clock time and handed to the sound card, not measured by the page. What can still move is the very first click, which waits a few tens of milliseconds for the audio context to open; after that the grid is fixed. Playing along with a recording is the practical test, and drift that would be obvious after thirty seconds simply does not appear.

What is a subdivision setting for?

It fills the space between beats with quieter clicks — two for eighth notes, three for triplets, four for sixteenths — while the beat itself stays where it is. It is how you practise a passage that keeps rushing: the ear locks onto the subdivision rather than to the beat, and the rushing has nowhere to hide. The quieter level is deliberate, since a subdivision as loud as the beat destroys the sense of the bar.

Where does the accent go in an odd time signature?

On the first beat of every bar, wherever the bar ends. Set beats per bar to five or seven and the accent lands every fifth or seventh click, which is enough for most practice; genuinely compound patterns like 3+2+2 need two accents and no metronome with a single accent can express them. Musicians usually solve that by counting the groups out loud over a plain click.

What tempo should I practise at?

Slow enough that the passage is correct every time, which is almost always slower than feels reasonable. The standard method is to find that tempo, play it clean five times, then raise the tempo by about five per cent — the plus-five button here is sized for exactly that. Raising by ten or twenty at a time is how mistakes get practised in.

Does the tempo name mean anything precise?

Only roughly, and it varied by era and by composer. The ranges here follow the common modern convention — Adagio around 60 to 76, Andante 76 to 108, Moderato to 120, Allegro to 156 — which is enough to settle an argument about whether a marking means what somebody’s recording does. The number is the instruction; the name is a description of it.

How this works

A repeating timer runs about forty times a second and does no sound work of its own: it looks ahead by roughly a tenth of a second and, for each click due inside that window, schedules an oscillator to start at an exact audio-clock time. Because those times are computed by adding the beat interval to a running position rather than by reading a wall clock, the grid never accumulates error. Each click is a short sine burst with an envelope of a few milliseconds so it cannot click at its own edges; accented beats are higher in pitch and louder, subdivisions quieter, which is what makes the bar audible. The visual beats are painted from the same schedule, matched against the audio clock as it passes each entry, so eye and ear stay together. Tap tempo takes the median gap between taps and ignores gaps over three seconds as pauses. Tempo is clamped to the 20 to 300 range that mechanical metronomes cover.

Sources:

Practice, not decoration

Nudge by one. The plus-one and plus-five buttons exist because tempo practice is done in small steps, and dragging a slider cannot do a small step reliably.

Tap what you hear. Tap tempo takes the median of your taps, so one late tap does not move the number the way an average would.

Sound before lights. The flashing is driven off the audio clock, so it never leads or lags the click — a metronome whose light and sound disagree is worse than one with no light.