TempoScope

Hold your phone up to the music and it finds the tempo and key in real time. Drop in an audio file and it pulls tempo, key, and the chord progression in one pass.

■ Free

· Live detection — tempo (BPM) and key from the microphone, as it plays
· Delay and reverb times — milliseconds worked out from the detected BPM. Straight, dotted, triplet
· The whole metronome — 30-300 BPM, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 12/8
· Bar maps — lay out a song that changes tempo or meter partway through and play it straight through. Section looping included
· Six sounds — electronic beep, tick-tock, wood block, cowbell, claves, rimshot
· Subdivisions — eighths, triplets, sixteenths, swing eighths, dotted eighth + sixteenth, sextuplets, 3:2 polyrhythm
· 59 drum style presets with a pattern grid
· Haptic beats (iPhone)
· Background playback — keeps clicking while you read a score or with the screen locked
· Record to MIDI — record your playing to the click and it writes the notes down as a piano roll (iPhone and iPad, reference only)

■ Pro (one-time lifetime purchase, not a subscription)

· Full-song analysis — free covers the first 60 seconds
· Save and revisit your analyses
· Setlist — put your songs in show order and on stage you only press Next. Tempo, meter, and drum pattern all switch together. Practice mode lets you save the tempo you settle on straight back to the song.
· Playback detection — leave it listening and it finds where songs change, splitting them into a list. Saving the song playing right now by hand is free for the first three
· Export MIDI — save a Record to MIDI result as a MIDI file, ready to drop into your DAW

■ About accuracy

Measured against 13 tracks with known answers: tempo was right on 13, key on 12. That is a small sample, so treat it as a guide. Chord detection is well below that and is a reference aid only — it goes wrong most often on ballads with dense harmony. Check it yourself with the free 60 seconds before you decide.

Record to MIDI is a reference aid too. In one test — 14 bars of a straight 8-beat drum groove, recorded at a live venue with an iPhone on the music stand — it got the kick and snare right in 13 of 14 bars and caught 43 of 56 hi-hat hits. Recording and viewing the result are free, so try it on your own playing first.

■ No internet needed

All analysis runs on your device. No account, no server, no ads. Audio from the microphone never leaves your device. The only recording kept is the last one you make yourself in Record to MIDI, and it stays on your device too.

■ Made for

· Sound engineers who need a song's tempo fast, on site
· Mixing engineers who need delay and reverb times that match the BPM
· Performers who change tempo song by song through a set
· Drummers practising triplets and polyrhythms