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Free BPM Finder for video editing: find the beat and cut to the music

Open a song or a video and get its tempo in BPM, with the half and double tempo, every beat drawn on the waveform and a click you can play over the music to check them. Then download beat markers for DaVinci Resolve (EDL) or a CSV of every beat, with a marker on every beat, every bar or every 2 to 16 beats. Everything runs in your browser: your file never leaves your device.

Updated · Built by Kevin Tabares, long-form YouTube editor at Umbrella Creators.

Find the BPM and the beats of a music or video file

Your file stays on your device. Nothing is uploaded: your browser decodes the audio and finds the beats right here, in this tab.

How to use it

  1. Choose the music file, or the video with the music in it (MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4, MOV or WEBM, up to 60 minutes on a computer and 20 on a phone). The music alone gives the cleanest result: a voice over the music makes the beat harder to find.
  2. Press Find the BPM. You get the tempo, the half and double tempo and every beat. Play the file with the click on to hear the beats over the music, and click the waveform to jump anywhere.
  3. Choose how often you want a marker (every beat, or every 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 or 16 beats), your timeline frame rate and the timecode where the song starts, then download the EDL for DaVinci Resolve or the CSV for any other editor.

The tool works best with music that has a steady pulse: pop, hip hop, electronic, rock and most production music. The first beat of each bar is an estimate, so check it before you cut on bars. For songs that speed up or slow down, the grid follows one main tempo and the tool tells you when parts of the file sit at a different one. In Safari, the audio of MOV files cannot be read and large MP4 or M4A files can fail or be read only in part; the tool tells you, and exporting the audio as MP3 or WAV, or using Chrome, gets the whole file.

Step-by-step guide

For the whole process around this tool, read How to edit a video to the beat of the music: how to put the beats on your timeline and cut every 2, 4 or 8 beats.

FAQ

How does this BPM finder work?
Your browser decodes the audio and measures how much the sound jumps up in 40 frequency bands every 8 milliseconds, which is where drum hits and notes start. The tempo comes from the autocorrelation of that signal (how well it lines up with itself one beat later), with a preference for tempos near 120 BPM, and the beat times come from dynamic programming: the best chain of evenly spaced moments that land on strong hits. It is the method of Beat Tracking by Dynamic Programming by Daniel Ellis (Columbia University, 2007), written for the browser.
Why does it show half and double tempo?
Because the same song can be counted at two speeds. In the listening tests Ellis used, people who tapped along to the same excerpt split into a slower and a faster group, two or three times apart. In my own tests, a drum and bass pattern at 174 BPM came out as 87, with 174 offered as the double. The tool picks one level and shows the other two; switch the grid to the one that matches how you want to cut.
How do I import the beat markers into DaVinci Resolve?
Choose your timeline frame rate and the timecode where the song starts, then download the marker EDL. In the Media Pool, right-click the timeline and choose Timelines, Import, Timeline Markers from EDL (shown in a screenshot on the Blackmagic forum). The file uses the marker structure a Blackmagic support engineer describes on the same forum: |C: for the color, |M: for the name and |D: for the length in frames. Both pages read on October 20, 2026; menu names can move between Resolve versions. For other editors, the CSV has every beat in seconds and in timecode.
Is the first beat of each bar detected?
Only estimated. The tool does not detect bars: it guesses the beats per bar (4, or 3 for a waltz) from how the strength of the beats repeats, and the bar start from the beat with the kick drum or the accented click, and marks those beats in red. The guess can be off by one or two beats. If the red markers land in the wrong place, change "Beats per bar" or "First marker on beat" and download again.
What happens with tempo changes, live music or no drums?
The beat grid follows one main tempo. Small drifts are fine (Ellis reports that his tracker usually holds tempo changes within about 10 % of the target), and the tool warns you when parts of the file sit at a different tempo. Music without a steady pulse, like ambient pads, rubato piano or speech, gets "no clear beat" instead of an invented number. A held synth chord can still wobble at a regular rate (two notes beating against each other), so the tool also checks that the repeats come from real hits, in step across the frequency range or as strong drum hits. Silent breaks get no markers.
Does it upload my file?
No. Your browser decodes the audio and finds the beats on your own device; the file never leaves this tab and nothing is downloaded. It works with music files and with videos, up to 60 minutes on a computer and 20 on a phone (10 for M4A and MP4), because decoding a long file takes a lot of memory: in my tests in Chrome on a computer, 60 minutes took about 6.5 GB as M4A, 3 GB as MP3 and 0.6 GB as WAV. Safari cannot read the audio of MOV files and fails, or stops early, on some large MP4 and M4A files; the tool warns you, and an MP3 or WAV export of the audio avoids it.

Who made this

I'm Kevin Tabares. I've edited long-form YouTube videos since 2015 (1,277 videos and 152.2M+ views tracked on YT Jobs) for channels like Rex & Alexa, Puff and Mud. I built this to get the beats of a song onto the timeline in seconds, without tapping along or uploading the track anywhere. If you want an editor for your channel, get in touch.

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