Lumituner Now Has a Metronome — Free, and Actually On Time
Lumituner started as a strobe tuner because “close enough” wasn’t good enough. The same standard now applies to time: there’s a metronome built into the tuner, and it’s free — no account, no unlock, right in the top bar at tune.lumituner.com.
Why most web metronomes drift
Most browser metronomes keep time with simple JavaScript timers. Timers in a browser are not precise — they get delayed by rendering, garbage collection, background tabs, whatever else the page is doing. The result is a click that wanders by tens of milliseconds. You can feel it, even if you can’t name it.
Lumituner schedules every click on the audio clock instead. Clicks are placed ahead of time, sample-accurately, by the same clock that plays the sound — the browser’s main thread can stutter all it likes and the beat won’t move. It’s the same architecture as our native iOS metronome, where clicks are rendered directly into the audio stream.
What’s in it
- Tempo from 30 to 300 BPM — slider, hold-to-repeat buttons, or tap tempo (tap along a few times; it averages your last six taps)
- Classical tempo markings — the display tells you when 119 BPM stops being Moderato and becomes Allegro
- Time signatures — 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 6/8, 7/8, 9/8, and 12/8, with sensible default accents (compound meters accent each group of three, the way they should)
- Editable accent patterns — tap any beat to cycle it through accented → normal → muted. Muting beats is an underrated practice tool: silence beats 2 and 4 and force yourself to keep time through the gaps
- Subdivisions — quarter, eighths, triplets, sixteenths
- Three click sounds — Click, Beep, and Wood, each with distinct accent, beat, and subdivision voices, synthesized rather than sampled
- A beat visual that pulses with the bar — green flash on accents, blue on regular beats, with a beat counter you can read across the room
Your settings — tempo, meter, accents, sound — are remembered between sessions.
Practice ideas to steal
A metronome is only as useful as what you do with it:
- Intonation practice for fretless players: run the tuner, then use the metronome to make your checks rhythmic instead of rushed
- The mute game: 4/4, mute beats 2 and 4, and play a scale. If the click and your internal clock disagree when the sound comes back, you found something to work on
- Compound meter fluency: switch to 9/8 or 12/8 and let the default group accents teach your hands where the pulse actually lives
- Slow practice that stays slow: 40 BPM with sixteenth subdivisions gives you a grid to hang slow passages on without losing your place
Free, like the tuner
The metronome is part of the free tier — same as the strobe tuner itself. It’s also in the upcoming native iOS app, with haptic clicks on every beat.
This is a first version, and there’s more coming — improvements and new features are already on the way. If something feels off or you’re missing a feature you rely on, tell me; this thing gets better the same way the tuner did.
Open tune.lumituner.com, hit the metronome button in the top bar, and play something in time.
