Bar And Beat Counter

Transport

• Start / Stop — press the big button or hit Space. Playback always begins on the next whole beat, so the click stays on the grid.
• Reset — stops playback, returns to 001 | 1 | 000, clears the Run timer, switches Loop off and restores the loop region to bars 5–8.
• Home key — return to zero without stopping.

Locating (mouse & touch)

• Click or tap the numbered scale to locate the playhead to that bar — the readout updates instantly and, while playing, the click follows immediately.
• Hold Shift while clicking to snap to the nearest beat instead of the bar.
• With a mouse you can hold and drag across the scale to scrub. On touch, drag the scale sideways to scroll a long timeline.
• Go to bar — type a bar number, then press Enter or the Go button.

Loop region

• Drag across the loop lane (the shaded strip above the bar numbers) to set the loop; this switches Loop on automatically. A single click makes a one-bar loop.
• Type exact bars in the Loop region fields, or press Loop whole song. The looped bars are shaded on the ruler.
• With Loop on, playback wraps from the end of the last looped bar straight into beat 1 of the first — sample-accurate, because the wrap is scheduled ahead on the audio clock.
• With Loop off, playback runs to the END marker (the song length) and stops there.

Count up / Count down

• Count up shows the absolute position from the top of the timeline.
• Count down shows what is left — to the loop end when Loop is on, otherwise to the END marker — as a negative bars | beats | ticks figure. Handy as a live cue display.

Practice mode: Hit the downbeat

• Pick Hit the downbeat in the mode row. Set a Target bar and a Lead-in (1–8 bars), then press Start game. The widget saves your loop, sets a temporary loop from the lead-in bar up to the target bar, and rolls.
• Hit the big Tap the downbeat pad — or press T or Enter — exactly on beat 1 of the target bar.
• Your tap is stamped with currentTime on the same audio clock that scheduled the click, so the score is the true offset, not a frame estimate. Offset is shown in milliseconds and in ticks at your current PPQ: minus is early, plus is late. One tick = 60 / BPM / PPQ seconds, so at 120 BPM and 480 PPQ a tick is about 1.04 ms.
• Grades: Perfect ≤ 15 ms, Great ≤ 35 ms, Good ≤ 70 ms, Close ≤ 130 ms, otherwise a miss. Good or better keeps the streak alive; anything looser breaks it. Tightest is your smallest absolute offset, Average is the mean of every tap.
• Only one tap is scored per cycle, so a double tap will not double count.
• The strip under the stats plots your last 16 taps — above the centre line is early, below is late, and the bar length is the size of the error.
• Hard mode silences the click for the bar before the target and for the target bar itself, so the last two bars are yours to count in silence. Turn it on and the readout is still there if you want it; look away for the real test.
• Stop game puts your original loop region and loop on/off state back exactly as they were. Reset scores clears the history without stopping.

Practice mode: Name that bar

• Pick Name that bar and press Start quiz. The whole song is looped for the duration of the quiz and the position is hidden: bars | beats | ticks, Time, Run and the ruler playhead all go dark. The beat lights keep flashing, because knowing the beat does not tell you the bar.
• Between 4 and 12 bars later the transport stops and asks what bar are we in? Type the bar number — or use the − / + buttons — and press Submit or Enter.
• Exact answers score and extend your streak; being one bar out is called out as such. The true bar is revealed and the readout comes back, then Next question re-hides it and rolls again.
• End quiz restores your own loop region and loop state.

Cue markers and the song map

• Type a bar and a name and press Add cue, or press Bar at playhead to fill the bar field from wherever you are, or just tap a preset name — Intro, Verse, Pre, Chorus, Bridge, Solo, Drop, Outro — to drop that name at the bar in the field.
• Cues appear as flags on their own lane on the ruler with a guide line down through the bar numbers. Tap a flag, or a cue chip in the list, to jump straight to that bar. The chip list wraps, so every cue stays visible — nothing is hidden behind a scrollbar.
• The × on a chip removes that cue; Clear all cues empties the map; Load a 32-bar map drops in a ready-made Intro / Verse / Chorus / Verse / Solo / Outro arrangement to play with.
• Adding a cue at a bar that already has one renames it. Cues past the end of the song are dropped if you shorten the song.
• While playing, the strip under the big readout shows the next cue and how far away it is, counted in bars and beats. With Loop on it wraps around the loop, so it always tells you what is coming next in the cycle.
• Cues live in memory for this session only. There is no save button because there is nothing to save to.

Count me in to bar X

• Arm Count-in, set the bar, and during the last four beats before that bar the strip turns into a big 4 · 3 · 2 · 1 countdown, the click changes to a distinct count-in beep on those four beats, and the whole readout pulses as the bar approaches. On arrival it flashes now.
• Use next cue arms the count-in for the next cue marker ahead of the playhead — one press and you get counted into the chorus.
• C toggles the count-in from the keyboard. With Loop on, the count-in re-arms every cycle.

Meter, grouping and tap tempo

• Beats per bar goes from 1 to 16 and the beat unit from a whole note to a 16th, so odd meters such as 5/4, 7/8 and 11/8 read out correctly — the bar simply has that many beats and the counter rolls over on the right one.
• The grouping field takes a plus-separated pattern such as 3+3 for 6/8, 2+2+3 for 7/8 or 3+3+3+2 for 11/8. The numbers must add up to the beats per bar or the field is ignored. Each group start gets a middle-weight click and its own beat light, so compound and additive meters actually sound grouped instead of being a flat row of beats.
• The preset row sets the signature and its usual grouping in one tap.
• Tap tempo averages your last few taps and sets the BPM. Pause for more than 2.5 seconds and it starts a fresh set.

Keyboard (click the widget once to focus it)

• Space start / stop · Home return to zero
• ← → nudge one bar · ↑ ↓ nudge one beat
• L loop on/off · M click on/off · D count direction · C count-in on/off
• T or Enter taps the downbeat while the game is running
• Arrow keys are never intercepted while a number field, text field, select or slider has focus, so you can edit values and type cue names normally.

Conventions used

• Bars and beats are 1-indexed. The very start of the timeline is 001 | 1 | 000, not bar 0 beat 0. Everywhere else in the widget means the same thing: the game's target bar, the cue bars, the count-in bar and the quiz answer are all counted from bar 1.
• Ticks are 0-indexed and run 0 … PPQ−1 inside the beat. Default 480 PPQ, the standard MIDI resolution. The game's tick offset is the only signed tick figure in the widget — it can go negative because it is a distance from the beat, not a position inside it.
• Tempo counts the beat unit you choose. One beat lasts exactly 60 / BPM seconds, so at 6/8 and 120 BPM an eighth note is 0.500 s and a bar is 3.000 s.
• Time is the timeline position of the playhead in mm:ss.mmm — it equals (elapsed beats) × 60 / BPM, so it always agrees exactly with bars | beats | ticks, and it jumps back with the loop just like a DAW sub-counter. Run is total wall-clock time since you pressed Start.
• Position is read from the Web Audio clock through a look-ahead scheduler, not from an animation frame counter, so it will not drift.

Tips

• Set a two-bar loop and watch the readout snap from the last tick of the loop straight back to | 1 | 000 — that snap and the accented beat 1 are the same scheduled event.
• For live playing, switch on Count down with a 4-bar loop: the display becomes a "bars until the change" cue that resets every cycle.
• Load the 32-bar map, arm the count-in on the Chorus with Use next cue, and run the song: you get a spoken-style 4-3-2-1 into the section every time round.
• Play the downbeat game in 7/8 with grouping 2+2+3 and hard mode on. Two bars of grouped click, two bars of silence, and you find out very quickly whether you actually feel the 7.