You can do so much more with this metronome
Show Contents

You can do so much more - Karaoke - Screen Shots - Videos - What you can do - User Reviews - 25 Special Features - Tempo Dial - Silent Metronome - Gravity Bounce - Swing? - Lilt - Harmonic - Melodic - For blind - For deaf - Feature Comparison - Links

“Its secret is incorporating various visual options such as 3D bouncing balls, animated drumsticks and conductor’s baton graphics. Rather like those used in karaoke machines, their rise and fall incorporates a ‘gravity bounce’ that feels like having your own conductor to help you keep in time...”
Printed review in Sound On Sound Magazine, January 2010

So what is this gravity bounce? Why is it so useful in a metronome?

If you want to skip this section: skip to next section: karaoke or to See what you can do - or 25 Special Features.

Let's ask the second question first. Why is it so useful?

Most musicians should find the visuals helpful, in the same way that a conductor's baton is helpful for keeping time in an orchestra. But it may be useful to go into this some more and find out why.

For Beginners

How can I play with the metronome?

These are just a few thoughts and tips to maybe help you get started. Of course no substitute for a teacher.

It is genuinely hard to play in time with a metronome, and especially so for a beginner. Yet most musicians will benefit from it so it is an important thing to learn to do (less important in some musical traditions).

Indeed, chances are, if anyone reading this thinks it is easy, it is perhaps most likely that you aren't listening to your metronome practice with a critical enough ear. Many people think they can play in time with a metronome but can't really, or don't realise you can use it to practice playing exactly in time with the metronome ticks. (Many examples on yutube)

So if you can't play with the metronome, you are in good (?) company. It's a great first step to notice that you can't do it yet.

The bounce visuals will help you there, because they help you to see exactly where you are in the measure and in each beat all the time.

Without the visuals, all you have is your memory of the time elapsed since the last click to guide you. So if you aren't that good at feeling the rhythm or playing an exact and steady tempo, you end up just guessing where the next beat will be. It's no surprise you easily get it wrong. With the bounce visuals to help you, you can see exactly where you are visually at any time so can see the next beat on its way before it happens and can see how far away it is and when exactly it will happen. It can also help you to internalise your sense of rhythm and pulse and eventually learn to do it without the visuals.

If you can't yet play along with a metronome at all, try it slowly to start with (not too slowly, fast enough so you have a feeling of a beat or rhythm). Start with something really simple, just an ascending and descending scale say or even a repeating note. You will find the bounce visuals help you to get the idea and to play your notes in time with the metronome. This may take a while so don't worry if you can't do it right away. Just keep trying until you "get it".

Try to hear where you are in the beat, whether early, late, or on the beat. More on this below in the section on playing to merge your notes with the metronome beat.

If you don't work visually much or are blind you may be unable to use the visuals in this way. I have an idea for a "bouncing noise" - like the sound of the wind rising and falling, an aural equivalent for the bounce - but it isn't programmed yet. But it will still help to try to notice whether your notes are early, late, or on the beat when playing with the metronome.

You can think of the metronome like a very inflexible band member, a drummer who never varies the beat at all. Can you play exactly in time with it in the same way you could play with such a drummer? If you can play in time with other musicians, then you should be able to play in time with a metronome, but it may feel unnatural to start with and take practice.

But won't I just end up playing mechanically like a clock?

Maybe, if you play with the metronome all the time. It may need some care not to go overboard with it.

The aim is to refine your sense of timing and rhythm, so you can feel the length of the beat and feel where you are in each beat at any time, with the utmost precision. The next beat is never a surprise, you don't panic to try to hit it in time as beginners so often do and land early or late - you know where it is and can hit it on the spot every time, and you have all the time you need to play it.

On that basis, you can play any rhythm you like, swing the beats, play ahead or behind the beat, play about with the time to your hearts desire.

To help get started playing around with the beat, and to break up any tendency to play like a clock, you might like to try practicing with the gradually changing tempo, with swing, and with the lilt and lilt measures features. These can help you get used to playing around with the rhythm in various ways. This helps to stop you getting settled into too much of a steady beat type feel for rhythm, so make use of them.

Also be sure to play without the metronome often, not get to the state where you can only play a steady tempo when you have a metronome or click track to help you - as is sadly true of many musicians. The Play then Silent feature of Bounce Metronome Pro will help you there. Of course you should also play without the metronome at all.

For Pros

For Pros, then although you should be able to play dead on the beat for a metronome or click track, or indeed, ahead or behind the beat as desired, and by as much as you like either way - still, you can refine your sense of rhythm and position in the beat even more. It is a continuing thing - you may think you are exactly on time, but then you begin to hear discrepancies of much smaller time intervals, and if you think of it, you can never be truly exactly in time with the tick e.g. to the nearest nanosecond or whatever :). So there is always more to learn.

Also the visuals can help you learn complex rhythms such as polyrhythms and mixed meters, and keep in time with them (so easily to fool yourself that you are playing a complex polyrhythm of several rhythms played at once when one of the parts isn't really truly completely independent of all the other ones), and play swing, and so on, plus of course use it for speed drills, and practice of tricky passages, like any other metronome.

For everyone

Also something about the bounce makes practice with the metronome a more organic and gentle process, and there is something in the natural feel to the bounce that makes it pleasurable to play with this metronome.

So - why does it work so well, what is it about the bounce?

It is easy and natural to anticipate the movement of a bouncing ball, baton or drumstick. So the visuals show the rhythm with precision - for more about this see Gravity Bounce Conductor. So you can also use it as a silent metronome - like watching a conductor - useful when your instrument is too loud to hear the clicks. Anyway probably it works because it is continuous, and doesn't just change in sudden jumps. So you see your place in the measure and in each beat at any moment. Also, the natural bounce motion helps you to feel the timing of each beat before it happens. This helps you to feel the rhythm and to anticipate the beat like a professional - and is extremely useful for practice of rhythms with irregular beat timings such as swing, or tricky rhythms like polyrhythms. You can set it to show beat numbers for the beats and subdivisions to help you keep track of where you are in the measure.

A useful exercise to help you feel the timing of rhythms more precisely.

One exercise which helps you to feel the rhythm more precisely is to play to try to merge your notes with the metronome clicks. This is something that the gravity bounce visuals will help you to achieve more easily. When you can do this, then you can play more exactly in time with other musicians too.

To start this exercise, first, you try playing consistently ahead of every beat first. Then behind the beat. Then get as close to the beat as you can from either side without hitting it. Then finally see if you can merge your notes with the beat so precisely that you and the metronome sound as one note. The sound of the metronome can seem to vanish on louder instruments like drums so it seems to miss a beat or two. On quieter instruments it will seem to get quieter or may seem to "become one with your note".

When you achieve this merge, this shows that you are exactly in time - but is hard to keep up for long because if you can no longer hear the metronome - how do you keep in time with it?

So - the bounce movement helps with this too. You can see your position in the beat clearly which helps when you want to play ahead or behind the beat. Then when you merge - then it doesn't matter that the sound of the metronome vanishes as you can still see your position in the beat. So - try this exercise and see if you can merge your notes with the clicks in this way - and how long can you keep it up for when you do?

For more on this topic see How to Stay in Time - Try to play so that your notes merge with the metronome tick

If you want to find out more about the gravity bounce, skip to gravity bounce

Bounce Metronome Pro has many more professional features

“Have you ever found it difficult to play along with a standard click track? Bounce Metronome Pro is a PC application supporting all time signatures, swing, and lots of clever stuff like paradiddles, polyrhythms and gradual tempo changes....”
Printed review in Sound On Sound Magazine, January 2010

For details of some of this "clever stuff", including the Play then Silent and Gradually Changing Tempo, skip forward to See what you can do - or 25 Special Features.

Or continue for screen shots and videos.

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Not a Karaoke Machine - sorry

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Although the bounce effect is "rather like" a karaoke machine, it takes a slightly different slant on things, and can't be used like that - at least not yet. So, if you want a karaoke machine you need to look elsewhere.

• You can use this software to help members of a band to play in time with each other
• You can use it to help synchronise singers with a live band - both singers and the live band need to follow the rhythm of the bouncing balls or lyrics - and then they will be in time with each other.
• But you can't yet use it to help you to synchronise your singing or playing with pre-recorded tracks of any sort. Not yet.

With a live band - it's probably most useful for occasional use during practice rather than for performance, as for any other metronome, as a way to learn to internalise a steady rhythm and tempo, and to notice when your tempo or rhythm is uneven - also to help with playing gradual tempo changes smoothly.

If used during performance, it has the same advantages and disadvantages as a click track, or live performance to a metronome - so can be used in similar situations and requires care in its use.

For proper use as a karaoke machine, then more work is needed on the software, and it can't yet do this.

If you want a karaoke machine, or software to add bouncing visuals to enhance your music tracks, you may like KaraFun - a free software tool that does this and I gather it is rather popular gets good reviews (no connection with me). See Karafun.

For details about the possibilities for BM Pro for karaoke etc. for the future, see the wishes: To play an audio recording and synchronise with the bounce - and to get the rhythm and lyrics from a midi file.

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Screen Shots
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Larger version of this screen shot

Many more screen shots here

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Videos
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You can use the icon at bottom right of the video to view it full screen. It's the icon with arrows pointing outwards to the four corners. This is the Flamenco Metronome with the 12 beat "clock" to help you keep your place in the complex rhythms.

♥

YOU CAN TRY IT OUT FIRST with your 30 day free Test drive Download Now This shows a four beat rhythm with swing, from the Swing metronome. More videos

Do you find that the visuals in this clip hesitate now and again and get out of sync with the sound? If so, don't worry, you can still use the metronome just fine. The software you download is carefully designed for your computer to play its visuals precisely in time with the rhythm.

This is a simple two beat conducting pattern suitable for rhythms such as 2/4 or fast 6/8. More conducting pattern videos

This shows 5, 3 and 7 beats per measure played simultaneously, each with 2 subdivisions. More Polyrhythm videos

From the Polyrhythm metronome.

For more videos see Watch Animations.

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"Clever Stuff" - See what you can do :-)
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Bounce Metronome Pro is a PC application supporting all time signatures, swing, and lots of clever stuff like paradiddles, polyrhythms and gradual tempo changes....”
Printed review in Sound On Sound Magazine, January 2010

So what about this "clever stuff"?

BASIC METRONOME

With just the Basic metronome you can play all time signatures including odd time signatures, with subdivisions, accents and syncopation and at any tempo. You can accent or skip any note in the rhythm with a single click - this helps with syncopated rhythms for instance. You can set the instrument individually for every beat in the rhythm.

The Basic metronome, despite the name, is already a very advanced metronome by any standards.

TEMPO DIAL FOR THE BASIC METRONOME

The Tempo dial comes with many features that make it fast to use, and to help with your metronome practice including Tap at tempo with the BACKSPACE key, and use of the ARROW keys to quickly adjust the tempo by one BPM or one tempo dial notch at a time, or step through a list of tempi with the UP and DOWN arrow keys.

You can use fractional BPM and the range in BPM is unlmited - if you want to set it to play one beat every thirty seconds, or 1000 beats per minute, or whatever, no problem.

PRO METRONOMES

With the pro version of the software, you get specialist metronomes for many different ways of practicing.

You can practice swing rhythms (for Jazz, Scottish dance etc). You can practice drum and dance patterns with a mixture of note sizes such as paradiddles - up to 16 parts each with its own rhythm, instrument, stereo pan position etc - or polyrhythms, mixed meters, also rhythms you tap out yourself. Need more information about this? See All the Metronomes.

PLAY THEN SILENT

You can set the pro metronomes to go silent for a number of measures. So - you might set it to play for 2 measures, then go silent for 2 measures and repeat. This is useful as an exercise to see if you are still in time with the metronome when it continues after the silence. This helps you to improve your ability to keep a steady tempo beat independently of the metronome - if you want to.

GRADUALLY CHANGING TEMPO

The Pro metronomes also include a gradually CHANGING tempo feature. This can be used to play the same section gradually faster and faster, or slower and slower - or to practice smooth tempo changes.

ANY RHYTHM YOU ARE LIKELY TO ENCOUNTER, BOUNCE METRONOME PRO CAN HANDLE IT

In short it can help you to play all the rhythms you are ever likely to need for your metronome practice and with all the tempo options you are ever likely to need.

Any rhythm you are likely to encounter, well Bounce Metronome Pro can almost certainly handle it.

You can also switch off the metronome ticks, and use it as a silent metronome. When you do that, it makes practice with the metronome a more organic and gentle process, and helps keep the practice vibrant and your rhythms more fluid and free as your timing and tempo improves.

TO FIND OUT MORE

If you think of any feature a metronome should have and you don't find it - do let me know. I continue to improve the design and add new features in response to many user questions and suggestions. To see a list of some of the things I've added recently, visit the What's new page.

To find out more about its capabilities - skip to 25 Special Features. Or if interested in a particular feature - click on any of the links in the description above.

Click here to Buy Now for only $6.99, or $26.99 with the Pro Features!

Or if it is new to you, you may want to try out a test drive first:

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25 Special Features
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• Gravity Bounce Conductor, drum sticks and bouncing ball to mark the start of each beat crisply and in time with the sound.
• Play without the sound as a silent metronome.
• Conducting patterns, bounce inside ovals, and other bounce patterns to help you play with precision
   

• Set any Tempo with the handy dial with any tempo including fractions of a BPM.
• Large easy to press tempo shortcut keys - Tap at tempo with Backspace key, Return key to stop and start play
• Set the tempo to change gradually over a time period in seconds or minutes
• Arrow keys to adjust tempo, or step through a list of all the tempi and rhythms for a practice session.
• Set up a script with all the rhythms and tempo changes for a complex piece of music - then just click the play button to play them all one after another - e.g. as conducting patterns.
   
• If you just want a steady tick you can do that
• Any time signatures - that includes odd time signatures
• Beat subdivisions for any of the time signatures
• Play the bar beats, beats and subdivisions with different instrument sounds
• Practice Swing Rhythms with any amount of swing.
  
 
• Accent any beat with just one click (with any number of levels of accent).
• Syncopation - using accents it is much easier to practice syncopated rhythms
• Skip any beat with just one click
• Quckly adjust individual beat volumes
• Quickly adjust individual beat times
  
 
• Drum and dance rhythms - set the metronome to play any rhythm with any combination of quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes etc one after another
• Polyrhythms (cross rhythms) e.g. play 3 beats and 4 beats in the same measure at the same time.
• Mixed meters (additive rhythms) and rhythm cycles
  
 
• Harmonic metronomes - pitched metronome using notes from the harmonic series so that they sound good together.
• fractal tunes - try out any rhythm with an automatically generated melody
• You can explore Theremin's Rhythmicon too, probably the first "drum machine", it played polyrhythmic chords using pitches from the harmonic series.
• Song Car Tunes ball bouncing on lyrics - set words to your rhythms

FREE BONUS, you get the Tune Smithy fractal tunes - play and create beautiful fractal music as intricate as snowflakes, your own royalty free fractal music.

It has separate metronomes easily selected from a drop list adapted to the special needs of various types of user. This makes it an ideal tool for Polyrhythms, Swing, Drum or Dance rhythms, Additive rhythms or rhythm cycles, for a feature rich Pro metronome, or for a basic time signature metronome - amongst the many possibilities.

This is just a selection. You will find many more features

The easiest way to find out what it can do is to download your free test drive. Try it out for yourself to see what it can (and can't) do.

What this software can't do yet

Features which it doesn't have yet, but may be possible in the future include:

• Synchronisation with a pre-recorded track - mp3 or midi - this is quite hard to program so you may not get this feature for a while
• Use n-tuplets and grace notes in the drum pattern rhythm editor
• Play tunes in abc notation
• Play conducting patterns recorded by human conductors or extracted from a video

Also check out the Bounce Metronome Pro Wish List for more things you can't do yet but may be able to in the future.

If still unsure whether it can do what you want, just contact me, and I'll let you know whether it can do what you want - or add your wish to the wish list if not.

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Tempo Dial - what is special about this dial?
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This is a screen shot. You need to download your free 30 day test drive of the metronome to try it out.

This dial probably looks ordinary enough at first sight, but its simplicity hides a number of secrets which will help with your practice in many ways.

You have unlimited tempo and fractional BPM (if outside the range of the dial, just type the desired tempo into the tempo field).

Quick adjust by one notch or BPM as you practice with a tap on the arrow keys on your keyboard. Tap at tempo feature - you just tap a few times with the Backspace key to set the dial to the tempo of your taps.

Then you can set it to a SMOOTHLY CHANGING tempo e.g. the same rhythm gradually faster and faster or gradually slower and slower, to learn to play at slow or fast tempi - or to practice professional smooth and gradual tempo changes.

Or - a useful feature for a practice session - step through the tempi - and rhythms too - of all your pieces with a single tap on the UP and DOWN arrow keys.

To find out more see the page on the Tempo Dial features.

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Now You Can Have a Silent Metronome - with No Annoying Metronome Click
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The conducting visuals are so crisp, they indicate the time with the precision of a conductor's baton. So, you can switch the sound off and use it as a silent metronome. It has the same precision as one with sound. (see Gravity Bounce).

“I found it reliable enough to abandon audio clicks altogether and use as a silent metronome, which also makes it useful for deaf musicians. Studio owners could display it on screen in their live rooms to keep players in time without them requiring headphones, while a special screen reader is available to blind musicians too” Martin Walker, PC Notes column in Sound On Sound Magazine

What's more there is something about the motion of the gravity bounce which is uplifting, and makes it feel more organic and enjoyable to work with.

For more about this see Silent Visual Metronome.

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Gravity Bounce Conductor - What makes it so easy to play in time with this metronome?
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The innovative gravity bounce conductor helps you to play exactly on the beat. This is especially useful when you are learning a rhythm with swing, syncopation, or irregular beat patterns.

So, how does it work, and why is it so successful?

It is easy and natural to anticipate the moment when a bouncing ball will hit the ground - so that you can sing, play or clap exactly in time with it.

This technique was used in the "Car tunes" movies towards the end of the silent movies era and for the first movies with sound. The ball bouncing on the lyrics helped the audience to sing along with the movie.

Conductor's use the same technique, a bouncing motion of the baton which helps to indicate the moment of the beat clearly and crisply.

So - the motion of a bouncing ball is one we happen to be able to synchronise with very easily (c.f. sports like tennis and football). So when you incorporate that into a metronome the result is natural feeling and easy to work with.

For more about this, see Gravity Bounce Conductor.

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What are Swing and lilt, and how does it help to have a metronome with these features?
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You find swung notes in many types of music, not just Jazz. Notes are played alternately longer and shorter than usual though normally notated all the same length. It is what gives music its lively quality. It is what makes you want to swing or dance to the music.

Even when the music doesn't belong to any of the genres associated with swing, it will still have a gentle "lilt". That's a slight unevenness in the timing of the beats which just lifts the music and makes it feel more natural and organice. All performers do this - often without knowing it as it can be quite a subtle effect.

If you practice the same piece with many different levels of swing or lilt, it may help you learn to vary the amount of swing, and play swing and lilt in a more flexible fashion.

It also may well make it easier to play along with the metronome if you set it to a gentle lilt - or a swing - depending on the music genre.

You can make swung rhythms with a light, medium or hard swing, or any custom amount of swing with Bounce Metronome Pro.

Bounce Metronome Pro is ideally suited for this too. It's gravity bounce visuals help you to anticipate each note before you need to play it - and this makes it much easier to practice with exactly the same amount of swing or lilt as the metronome, and so use the metronome to help learn to vary the amount of your swing.

For more about this, see Swing and Lilt Metronome

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Harmonic features - an idea from music therapy
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Here the idea is that each number of beats per measure is assigned a pitch, so e.g. 7 beats to the bar corresponds to the seventh harmonic, 5 beats to the bar corresponds to the fifth and so on.

The results sound harmoniously together as they use pitches from the harmonic series. See Harmonic Features for more about this.

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Play your rhythms with a new tune each time
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This is a way to create automatically generated tunes to brighten up your music session, or as a way to hear your rhythm played melodically. Perhaps most useful if you practice a non melodic instrument like drums - or just for fun.

It can also be used for algo-comp type composition but for that you are best using Tune Smithy rather than Bounce Metronome Pro as it is all set up for this sort of work.

The automatically generated tunes use fractals - similar idea to the visual fractals such as the mandelbrot set etc. Though in this case it is based on a musical equivalent of the Koch snowflake fractal.

To find out more see Melodic Features.

Special note about the BM Pro tunes for FTS users

Bounce Metronome Pro does have some new features such as the skipped beats and other rhythmic features which aren't yet in FTS, so it's possible some keen algo-comp users of FTS might want to use BM Pro to exploit these features. But your tunes made with BM Pro won't yet play in FTS until I do the update to FTS 4.1 hopefully later this year.

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Accessibility for blind musicians
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For blind users and those who don't work visually very much perhaps because you are visually impaired, there is an alternative interface designed for you.

With this text based interface, you can play all the same rhythms as a sighted user. You can use all the features - except for the bouncing ball visuals of course - and an option to get beats from a groove via clicks on the visual display of the waveform. Everything else is accessible through your screen reader.

For more about this, see the Blind Musician's Metronome page.

Download your Free Test Drive Now!

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Accessibility for deaf musicians
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Since it can be used entirely visually, as a silent metronome, it is an ideal metronome for a deaf musician. There is no need to be able to hear the sound to play in time with the metronome.

See Deaf Musician's Metronome.

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Feature Comparison Chart
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For a list of all the features available in Bounce Metronome Basic and in Bounce Metronome Pro and a feature comparison chart, see Details and Features.

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Links
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For more about the bouncing balls in early movies, see Sound Car-tunes and Bouncing Ball. For swung rhythms, see Swung note (wikipedia)

Here is a useful Short History of the Metronome

To find other relevant material, try some of the top google searches related to this web site -see keywords.

Some top keyword searches particularly relevant to this page: rhythm, metronome, rhythms, metronomes, metronome download, metronome software, and metronome, tempo metronome, downloadable metronome (click on the link to search in Google).

For some of the other metronome software available, see the Metronomes section at HitSquad. For a collection of free on-line metronomes see the BestMetronome.com

I recently came across another software metronome with a bouncing ball display with the ball bouncing under simulated gravity, (there are many that have lights or a ball that move up and down at constant speed, but this is the only other one I know with a gravity bounce). See the Professional Metronome by Storm Software.

I've also found a metronome for mobile phones with conducting visuals, called Metronome 3D. For videos, search Youtube for "Metronome 3D".

Here is a long list of some of the other on-line and Windows desktop metronomes. with some of the main features - free or shareware.

- (shorter versions of this page: Buy Metronome for Windows, Buy this metronome software here)

Keyword Ad landing pages

Many of these are very similar to each other - just so that the title and the exact text on the page can match the text on the keyword ad. If you click on one of the ads in e.g. the Google search results you will probably end up on one of these pages.

Bounce Metronome Pro for Sale - (Metronome for Sale 2) - (for Sale 3) - Buy Bounce Metronome Pro - Buy or Download - Download Metronome (Download Metronome 2) (Download Metronome 3 ) - Metronome for Windows - Metronome Free Test Drive - Time Signature PC Metronome (Time Signature Metronome 2) (Time Signature Metronome 3 ) - Metronome Free Test Drive

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