App: Quarter notes per minute option#62

Currently, the tempo setting is strictly BPM: beats per minute, whether the beats are quarters or eighths or halves. That essentially makes the beat identical no matter what time signature you have: 4/1, 4/2, 4/4 and 4/8 all sound the same (which defies the purpose of having them). With DAW sync this turns into a big problem, I’ll outline a case where things fall apart irreparably:

Let’s say I have a track in Reaper with a time signature of 7/8 at 120 BPM. That means that the 8th notes have a BPM of 240. Let’s say the metronome pattern I need has an accent on beats 1, 4 and 6.

When receiving the MIDI clock from Reaper, the Core, set to a TS of any 7/x will play seven beats at the BPM of 120. That means that what I’m actually getting is a bar of straight 7/4 superimposed over 2 bars of 7/8. It’s a pleasant polymeter if you get all the metronomes in sync but it’s not terribly practical.
I can achieve “eighths” by setting the subdivision on the Core to “two eighth notes” but what I’m getting then is just a stream of eighths that I can’t set meaningful accents to.

Changing the BPM in the DAW is not an option — it can mess up MIDI items and it’s not good practice to change the track to suit a metronome.

What the app could do would be to give us the option to choose whether we want the tempo to work as beats per minute or quarter notes per minute. BPM would work as it currently does (and x/4 will be = x/8 as it is now), QuartersPM would halve and double the beat when switching between x/4, x/8 etc.

Thanks for writing this up - makes sense. We get this request occasionally. Unfortunately as far as I understand it from our engineers it’s quite high effort because it requires to refactor the metronome algorithm on iOS, Android, Pulse and Core at the same time. But for sure it would be a useful upgrade for eternity. I’m curious to see how many upvotes it will get!