BPM

A lightweight beats-per-minute tapper that lives in the macOS menu bar. Click the icon in time with the beat and it reports the average BPM. Useful for figuring out whether a track will fit into a set.

Usage

• Click — register a tap. After the second tap, the menu bar shows the running average BPM.
• Right-click — reset.
• ⌘-Click — copy the current BPM to the clipboard.
• ⌥-Click — show the instructions popup.
• ⌃-Click — quit the app.

The display auto-resets to the placeholder glyph after ~1.5 seconds without a tap.

Building

Open bpm.xcodeproj in Xcode and build. The project produces a Universal Binary (Apple Silicon + Intel) and targets macOS 11.0 Big Sur or later.

License & attribution

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC BY 3.0).

Originally created by Ben Brook (@bencmbrook) — upstream repository: https://github.com/bencmbrook/bpm. Subsequently modified by Harry Clegg (@harryclegg) — upstream fork: https://github.com/harryclegg/bpm. Further modified in this fork by Tim Erickson (@t1merickson).

This is a modified version of the original work; modifications are summarized in the changelog below.

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Changelog

This fork — @t1merickson

• Menu bar UI polish:
  • Replaced the "bpm" text in the ready state with the music.quarternote.3 SF Symbol (template-rendered so it tints with the menu bar).
  • Status item now has a fixed width sized for the widest possible 3-digit BPM ("888"), so it no longer jumps around as the BPM digit count changes.
  • Menu bar text is rendered 1pt smaller than the system default for a slightly more refined look.
  • SF Symbol weight and size tuned (pointSize: 15, weight: .medium) to sit comfortably next to other menu bar glyphs.
  • Tooltip is now dynamic: shows "BPM Tapper — click to tap" in the ready state, "Keep tapping…" after the first tap, and " BPM — ⌘-click to copy" once a BPM is being measured.
• New behavior:
  • ⌘-Click copies the current BPM to the clipboard, for quickly pasting tempo into a DAW or notes. Beeps if there's nothing to copy yet.
  • Removed the splash/instructions dialog that appeared on every launch. Instructions are still available via ⌥-Click.
• Code health:
  • Bumped deployment target from macOS 10.13 → macOS 11.0 (required for SF Symbols).
  • Fixed a latent force-unwrap of NSApp.currentEvent in the click handler that could crash on programmatic / accessibility-driven invocation.
  • Tightened the instructions popup copy and switched it from a .warning alert style to .informational (it was using the yellow caution triangle for what is really just a help dialog).
  • Removed the now-dead noShowDialogOnStart preference plumbing and "Do not show this message on launch" suppression checkbox.
  • Removed the demo gif from the repo.

v1.3 — @harryclegg

• Re-wrote the application logic from the ground up. Tap-interval tracking was split out into a dedicated BPMTapper class with explicit reset / averaging behavior; AppDelegate is now just the menu bar wiring.
• Fixed the timing logic so the running average correctly weights every tap interval (#3).
• Upgraded the Xcode project files to build cleanly on modern Xcode versions (#1).
• Small user-interface and user-experience tweaks throughout.
• Added an option to suppress the instructions popup at launch (later removed in this fork, since the popup itself no longer fires on launch).

Original — @bencmbrook

• Initial release of the menu bar BPM tapper for OS X.
• Click in time with the beat; the menu bar shows the running average BPM.
• Right-click to reset, control-click to quit.
• Instructions popup on first launch with a "don't show again" option.
• Yosemite (OS X 10.10) compatibility.
• Packaged as a downloadable .zip once the original hosting site went down.