dsp mobile

Do you want to know the tempo of a song playing? Use the Beat Detector to find out! It listens to the music around you and detects the tempo in BPM (beats per minute). It can even give you an estimate of the signature (meter) of the music, distinguishing between 3/4 and 4/4.
Forget about tapping, this app doesn’t need your help! It works best with music containing strong rhythmic information like electronic music, Rock’n Roll or HipHop. You can touch the display to switch between short and long time duration.

Beat Detector features:
- automatic beat detection utilising the built-in microphone or any external microphone connected to the input jack
- no tapping required
- short and long time duration
- estimate of the signature / meter (only in long duration mode)
- smooth facebook connectivity for sharing BPM, notes and pictures

Beat Detector screenshots:

Technical notes:

Being musicians ourselves we wanted a beat detector working without tapping – just giving us the tempo of the song playing. Finding the beat and rhythm of music is very natural for humans but really hard for machines. That’s why the Beat Detetector makes use of some really sophisticated DSP algorithms. Because these algorithms require some computing efforts, it may take a while for the results to show on older devices like iPhone 3. But by touching the tempo / meter display you can change the time duration between short and long (approximately 3 and 6 seconds). Using the short duration reduces the computing time and doesn’t give a meter estimate. The Beat Detector works best on iPhone 4S and iPad2 – the computing time on these devices is about 8 seconds.

The meter / signature information is an estimate – we don’t pretend to be always right…

Since the Beat Detector operates on energies it will always show a result – even if there’s no music playing. We don’t think this is a problem – to determine if there is music playing or not would have increased the computing time!