Metronome Help

Start with the issue you can hear or see. If a control behaves differently from its description, report it with the page address and browser name.

Why can I not hear the click?

Press Start first: browsers can restrict audio until you interact with the page. Check both the page volume and your device volume, then check whether sound is being sent to headphones or another output.

If that does not help, stop playback and reload. Start again after the page has loaded. Avoid opening several playing metronome tabs while troubleshooting.

Mute, a volume of zero, and a bar where every beat is silent are different from Stop. The status line says which one is happening. Click, Woodblock, Beep and Tick are different sounds made in the browser.

Why does the tempo seem wrong?

Check the beat unit and subdivision setting. Two eighth-note clicks inside one quarter-note beat are not two quarter-note beats. In 6/8, a dotted-quarter pulse and an eighth-note click rate differ by a factor of three.

The tempo control accepts 20 to 300 BPM. If you used tap tempo, try tapping a slower pulse or the pulse twice as often. The number reflects your chosen tapping level, not necessarily a printed tempo marking. Tap tempo averages recent gaps, starts a new sequence after a pause of more than two seconds, and withholds a number when the gaps disagree by more than half.

What should I do if playback is interrupted?

Keep this tab visible while checking the problem. Stop the click, return to the page and restart. Note whether the interruption followed a screen lock, tab change, connected audio device or tempo adjustment.

If this browser suspends audio, or the scheduler wakes too late to keep the click grid, the metronome stops and shows “Playback paused by the browser. Press Start to continue.” That sentence is used only when playback has actually stopped. We do not claim uninterrupted background playback or a tested timing tolerance. Please report a repeatable interruption rather than relying on the click for a timing-critical situation.

Practice and settings

For a short exercise, choose one difficult transition and repeat it with a comfortable click. A guitarist might isolate a chord change; a drummer could keep a single sticking pattern; a singer can speak a phrase in rhythm before singing it. These are suggestions rather than a fixed programme or guaranteed route to faster playing.

Change one variable at a time. Try the same passage with a different tempo or subdivision, then listen for what changed.

Use the labelled controls shown on your version of the tool. See time signatures for grouping and subdivisions for smaller pulses.

Keyboard

• Space: start or stop. This does not run while you are typing in a field, or when a button or link has focus. On the tempo trainer, Space starts or stops the trainer.
• Arrow keys: change the tempo by 1 BPM when the tempo field or the tempo slider is focused.

Settings saved in this browser

Tempo, beat unit, time signature, subdivision, accents, volume, mute, click sound, the visual beat indicator and tempo-trainer inputs are saved in this browser when storage is available. The saved key is onlinemetronome.settings. Opening the site does not start the click. On the metronome, open Advanced and choose Reset settings to clear them, or clear site data for this site in your browser.

Browser reference

MDN: Web Audio API best practices, checked 7 November 2026. Device-specific guarantees are intentionally omitted.