Beat & Rate: Watch Rate Meter

Hold your mechanical watch against the bottom of your phone and see how it is running: its daily rate in seconds a day, its beat error, and its balance amplitude, side by side, with a live trace of every tick.

Beat & Rate finds the beat rate on its own, from 12,000 to 72,000 beats an hour, and adjusts to how loud the ticks are. When the ticks are faint or the room is noisy, it does not stop at an error. A signal meter shows how far to trust the numbers and what would help: closer contact, a quieter spot, or a headset or USB microphone. When single ticks are too faint to time, it averages several beats together and keeps reading.

WATCHES
• Rate (s/day), beat error (ms) and amplitude (degrees), with averaging over 10, 30 or 60 seconds
• Amplitude from a lift angle you can set, 52° by default
• Amplitude needs a quiet room: where noise or echo hides the watch’s first sound, the app shows a dash instead of a number
• A guided run through six positions, dial up and down and crown up, down, left and right, with the spread between the fastest and slowest position
• A paper-tape trace: a steady slant is the rate, two lines are the beat error

CLOCKS
• Pendulum, mantel, cuckoo and 400-day clocks, from 400 to 14,400 beats an hour
• Beats per hour, an in-beat check showing how evenly tick and tock are spaced, and the daily rate against the beat rate your clock should run at

HISTORY
• Save readings to each watch or clock and see the rate over time
• Export everything as a CSV file

NO WATCH TO HAND?
The app includes demo recordings you can play through the same analysis.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
The microphone is used only to hear the ticks. Audio is analysed on your phone as it arrives and is never recorded or sent. No account, no analytics, no ads.

One purchase. No subscription.

Every reading is an estimate. Your phone's own clock can be a few seconds a day off, and every rate inherits that; if you know your phone's error, enter it once as a calibration and every rate includes it.