Is there such a thing as a 100% accurate BPM calculator?

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quasilib

New member
now obviously, everybody knows that Tap Tempo is extremely easy, fast and reliable, but is there such a thing as a calculator that can be just as accurate? everybody I've seen talks very highly of MixMeister BPM Analyzer but a lot of times it'll be spot on and a lot of times it'll be really off...sometimes I'll throw an old soul song in there and it'll give me an outrageous tempo like 160BPM...I'm going to assume there isn't one, but I just wanted to make sure because a tool like that is nice if you want to really quickly check the BPM of a bunch of different samples...I know there's a lot of other AUTOMATIC calculators out there, but I'm gonna assume that most are garbage
 
BPM counters are good, but it is always going to boil down to the art of it and less of the science of it. The art of it being having/developing the ear to know what sounds good together. As stated before they can't really be relied upon. As Ellaskins always says "practice and enjoy".
 
Yeah BPM counters are useful but it's never good to always trust their judgement, with a bit of your own intuition you could pick up on what it missed.
 
Traktor scratch has a perfect bpm counter.

It uses the same algorithms as mixmeister bpm I believe, but for the ones it does not pick up correctly, it has a tap feature that 90% of the time locks it down correctly. but if it doesn't, especially with live instrumentals like old soul/funk, you can create a loop up to 32 beats, devide that by 2, in effect making it a 64 beat loop (this will half the bpm), and amend a loop to pretty accurately get the bpm of those more annoying tracks!

you should be able to get a demo version of it, which gives you 30 mins or so of messing about getting and "locking" bpm's to tracks before the demo closes, you can open it again after, it just closes every 30 mins, until you buy it, but good for what you want it for!, you actually lock the mp3 as a tag on the track.

Look for tutorials of how to do the basics of amending and setting bpm with traktor on youtube
 
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quasilib said:
now obviously, everybody knows that Tap Tempo is extremely easy, fast and reliable, but is there such a thing as a calculator that can be just as accurate? everybody I've seen talks very highly of MixMeister BPM Analyzer but a lot of times it'll be spot on and a lot of times it'll be really off...sometimes I'll throw an old soul song in there and it'll give me an outrageous tempo like 160BPM...I'm going to assume there isn't one, but I just wanted to make sure because a tool like that is nice if you want to really quickly check the BPM of a bunch of different samples...I know there's a lot of other AUTOMATIC calculators out there, but I'm gonna assume that most are garbage
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Each BPM calculator that uses audio hits/peaks as the basis for calculation is as accurate as they can be.

With old soul records, they may be picking up the off-beats as significant audio hits/peaks and so double the tempo.

Some old Smokey Robinson tunes have a drum part that sort of looks like this:


HH:XXXXXXXX|XXXXXXXX|XXXXXXXX|XXXXXXXX:|
Sn:.X.X.X.X|.X.X.X.X|.X.X.X.X|.X.X.X.X:|
Kk:X.X.X.X.|X.X.X.X.|X.X.X.X.|X.X.X.X.:|

​

I would count 8 significant hits to each bar in there (On beat kicks and offbeat snares), but would recognise that there were only 4 beats in the bar and so adjust my tempo count accordingly. A piece of software would need additional information before it could make that adjustment.

Use your ears as has been said, and apply the knowledge they bring you to effectively render the BPM's calculated to what they should be
 
If you're using a program that lets you loop measures and gives you a precise time for the loop, you can use this software to calculate very precise BPMs.

SampleCalc

It won't calculate it automatically on the fly, but it has a tap tempo function and it's very light on memory usage, so you can have it open in the background and find BPMs manually. It's very useful for cataloging tracks ahead of time. I find it indispensable when producing with drum loops.
 
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Im not sure if this helps your situation but I run into a lot of bpm meters that will double the bpm until it can get an accurate count...one of my cdj's does it all the time...when it does do it, 160 = 80bpm, 170 = 85 and so on.
 
Traktor is about as good as it gets, but still it's never 100%.

Usually, traktor will be either dead on or way off, but if you tap out the song in Traktor for a few bars it will lock on 95% of the time. I don't think I've ever had a song that Traktor couldn't lock onto after tapping it out. This is for songs with a completely steady tempo. (So basically all new music)
 
I am using an app for Iphone named TempoTapper. Very good one. There are a lot of tempo apps out there for smartphones, some of them will give you tempo from listening to your song.
 
TurtleKid said:
I will openly hi5 any DJ that does that live during a set.
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If you have any kind of skill you should be able to beat match by ear when playing live rather than go off a readout of BPM.

However if you do need to figure out BPM for what ever reason I find a stopwatch to be the most accurate, tap tempo works the same way but is often less accurate because it calculates off a shorter distance. Beat detection software is also not that good because it works off transients, it is quite useful for live performances when used to drive shit from MIDI clock, I use hardware though, a RedSound Voyager as well as the MOTU MIDI Express XT.
 
stopwatch and a math calculator (and nimble fingers) or like said above, selected loop duration and a math calculator
 
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