How to find the BPM of a song in Audacity? Frequently Asked Questions

Audacity has become a very popular piece of software over the last few years. Many musicians use it for it’s excellent editing features, and the tracking aspects of the software are generally seen as being highly professional in quality, and practical to use.

It has seen a variety of uses, and in recent times has become a preferred method of creating high quality podcasts, for example. Perhaps it’s biggest draw for musicians though, is the ability to edit a piece of music on a large scale.

The most common way that Audacity can be used to find the BPM of a track is by using its own Beat Finder (Accessed by: Analyze > Beat Finder). This allows users to listen to a piece of music, and set parameters for the number of beats to find.

There are limitations here, because Audacity has drawbacks in that it sometimes struggles to find beats in particularly dense pieces of music. This is due to wrong peaks detection, which is a common issue with BPM detection tools (including ours).

Some users have bypassed that issue by using a mixture of BeatFinder, and their own counting of the beats. While this is by no means ideal, it does not take away from the quality of Audacity. Most commercial editing and tracking software would have exactly the same issues in finding BPM in modern music. (inc. our MP3 to BPM Detector)