Fun With Freeware 1

The author's notes explain, better than we could even begin to, what Frames_n_Beats is, what it does and how to use it, so we will repeat part of what you will find with the program if you install it on your computer. This is not us being idle, it is pure common sense!

To set the Beats per Minute (BPM) by tapping to the beat (ie: you are listening to the music), first click the "Tap BPM" button to the right hand side of the window. A small window will appear where you just
clicked. You have 60 seconds to "Tap" the spacebar before the window will automatically close. The program will take the last 8 beats you tapped, average them and calculate how many Beats per Minute (BPM) it was.
That's right. It only keeps track of eight beats, so you can keep going  until the last eight felt good. Let yourself warm up a bit.

Press the"A" key at any time to "Accept" it's reading before the 60 seconds is up. You can also press "C" to ignore that you ever tried tapping the BPM at all.

Why only the last eight beats? Well, for one thing it measures time from your system in milliseconds.
Keeping the number of beats kept track of preserves the accuracy while preventing this process from bogging down after a while. Eight beats of 4/4 time is two full measures. That's plenty of time.

If you want to hear how fast the selected BPM is, click the "Play BPM" button, also on the right (organized eh?). You will hear a metronome "Beep" to the right tempo. See how the button says "Playing" now?
You can even adjust the BPM slider while it's running! Click it again and it will stop. 

If you want a little more control, you can replace the metronome sound by replacing the file named "tick.wav". Whatever you replace it with must be named "tick.wav". Any format WAV file will do, but it should be a fairly short sound. It's for a metronome after all.

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