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Milliseconds to BPM.
A number of milliseconds has no tempo on its own — it has one per assumption about what you measured. This gives you all fourteen readings at once and tells you which is the one a deck would show.
Measured as one
120.00
500 ms as quarter note puts the track at 120.00 BPM. A quarter note there is 500.0 ms and a bar is 2000 ms.
The catalog holds 20,913 tracks stored at 120 BPM — see them.
The same 500 ms, read as every other division
This is the table that answers the question properly. A measurement on its own has no tempo — it has a tempo per assumption about what you measured, and the row that lands between 60 and 200 without folding is almost always the right one.
| Read as | Tempo | Folded | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1920.00 | 120.00 | A phrase. The unit a breakdown is built out of. | |
| 960.00 | 120.00 | The longest loop that still feels like a loop. | |
| 480.00 | 120.00 | The default loop length on every CDJ. | |
| 240.00 | 120.00 | Two beats. A long, obvious echo. | |
| 180.00 | — | Three eighths. Pulls against a straight four and makes it swing. | |
| 120.00 | — | One beat. Kick to kick. The reference every other number here is a fraction of. | |
| 90.00 | — | The stadium delay. Three sixteenths — wide, off-grid and instantly recognisable. | |
| 80.00 | — | Three in the space of two beats. Swing without changing the groove. | |
| 60.00 | — | Half a beat. Adds density without slowing anything down. | |
| 45.00 | 90.00 | A tight, rhythmic slap. | |
| 40.00 | 80.00 | The shuffle. What separates UK garage from house. | |
| 30.00 | 60.00 | A quarter beat. Hi-hat resolution, and the shortest delay that still reads as an echo. | |
| 20.00 | 80.00 | A roll. Below this it stops being rhythm and becomes texture. | |
| 15.00 | 60.00 | Flam territory. Under about 30 ms an echo turns into a comb filter. |
A dash in the Folded column is a tempo you could read off a deck as it stands. Going the other way — BPM to milliseconds — is the same table with the arithmetic reversed.
The fold
Why 30 BPM and 120 BPM are the same measurement
Every tempo has an octave twin, and both are true.
A two-second gap is 30 BPM if you counted it as one beat and 120 if you counted it as one bar. Neither reading is wrong; they are the same pulse counted at different resolutions, exactly the way a drum & bass record at 174 is also, truthfully, an 87 BPM record with twice as many hi-hats.
Which means a converter that prints one number and stops is hiding the actual question. What a DJ wants is the reading that lands in the range a deck would display, and to be told when the tool has had to double or halve to get there.
This is also the single largest source of wrong tempos in any music library. Around a tenth of what we hold is stored under 95 BPM, and most of it is not slow music — it is fast music whose detector locked onto the half-time pulse. The long version of that is worth ten minutes if you have ever wondered why your library disagrees with Beatport.
The reference
Common tempos in milliseconds
The six tempos the catalog holds most of, with the numbers you would actually dial in.
| Tempo | Quarter | Dotted eighth | Eighth | One bar | Tracks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 128 BPM | 468.8 ms | 351.6 ms | 234.4 ms | 1875 ms | 35,827 |
| 124 BPM | 483.9 ms | 362.9 ms | 241.9 ms | 1935 ms | 31,375 |
| 125 BPM | 480.0 ms | 360.0 ms | 240.0 ms | 1920 ms | 28,681 |
| 126 BPM | 476.2 ms | 357.1 ms | 238.1 ms | 1905 ms | 27,544 |
| 122 BPM | 491.8 ms | 368.9 ms | 245.9 ms | 1967 ms | 25,227 |
| 130 BPM | 461.5 ms | 346.2 ms | 230.8 ms | 1846 ms | 23,864 |
Track counts are tracks stored at exactly that rounded tempo in the public catalog. Half-time artefacts under 95 BPM are excluded from this table for the reason above.
Every division
What each division is, in beats
Shown at 128 BPM, because that is the tempo most people have a feel for.
| Division | In beats | At 128 BPM | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 bars | 16 beats | 7500.0 ms | A phrase. The unit a breakdown is built out of. |
| 2 bars | 8 beats | 3750.0 ms | The longest loop that still feels like a loop. |
| 1 bar | 4 beats | 1875.0 ms | The default loop length on every CDJ. |
| Half note | 2 beats | 937.5 ms | Two beats. A long, obvious echo. |
| Dotted quarter | 1.5 beats | 703.1 ms | Three eighths. Pulls against a straight four and makes it swing. |
| Quarter note | 1 beat | 468.8 ms | One beat. Kick to kick. The reference every other number here is a fraction of. |
| Dotted eighth | 0.75 beats | 351.6 ms | The stadium delay. Three sixteenths — wide, off-grid and instantly recognisable. |
| Quarter triplet | 0.6666666666666666 beats | 312.5 ms | Three in the space of two beats. Swing without changing the groove. |
| Eighth note | 0.5 beats | 234.4 ms | Half a beat. Adds density without slowing anything down. |
| Dotted sixteenth | 0.375 beats | 175.8 ms | A tight, rhythmic slap. |
| Eighth triplet | 0.3333333333333333 beats | 156.3 ms | The shuffle. What separates UK garage from house. |
| Sixteenth note | 0.25 beats | 117.2 ms | A quarter beat. Hi-hat resolution, and the shortest delay that still reads as an echo. |
| Sixteenth triplet | 0.16666666666666666 beats | 78.1 ms | A roll. Below this it stops being rhythm and becomes texture. |
| 32nd note | 0.125 beats | 58.6 ms | Flam territory. Under about 30 ms an echo turns into a comb filter. |
Frequently asked
Common questions
How do I work out the BPM from a length in milliseconds?+
Divide 60,000 by the milliseconds and multiply by how many beats you measured. A 500 ms gap between two kicks is 60,000 ÷ 500 = 120 BPM as one beat. A 2,000 ms loop measured as one bar is 60,000 ÷ 2,000 × 4 = 120 as well. The multiplier is the whole game: the same measurement is a different tempo depending on what you think you measured.
Why does it say my tempo has been doubled?+
Because the literal answer was outside the range anyone reads off a deck. A four-second loop read as one bar is 60 BPM; read as four bars it is 240. Every tempo has an octave twin, and both describe the same pulse — the only difference is what you count. Tap-tempo buttons do this silently and a lot of people have never noticed. This says so out loud instead.
What length is a bar in milliseconds?+
Four beats, so 240,000 divided by the tempo. At 120 BPM a bar is 2,000 ms exactly, at 128 it is 1,875 and at 174 it is 1,379. That is the number to reach for when you are setting a loop rather than a delay, and it is the one most people work out wrong by forgetting the four.
I have a delay time from a pedal. What tempo is it synced to?+
Depends which division it was set to, which is why the table on this page shows all of them. A 375 ms delay is 160 BPM as a quarter note and 128 as a dotted eighth — and since a dotted eighth is by far the most common setting on a DJ or producer delay, 128 is almost certainly the answer. The row that lands in club range without folding is usually the right one.
Is this the same as tapping a tempo?+
It is the arithmetic underneath it. A tap tempo measures the gap between your taps in milliseconds and does exactly this conversion, assuming you tapped quarter notes. If you want to tap rather than measure, the BPM tapper does that; this is for when you already have a number and no way to tap it.
Why is there a separate page for this and for BPM to milliseconds?+
Because they are asked at opposite ends of a job. "BPM to ms" is a production question — you know the tempo and you are setting a delay. "ms to BPM" is a detective question — you have a number off a loop, a sample or somebody else's pedal and you do not know what it belongs to. The second one needs the fold and the all-divisions table, and neither belongs on the first.
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BPM to milliseconds · Beats to time · BPM tapper · Half-time & double-time · Key & BPM finder · Set length calculator · Every tempo · All tools
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