Math for DAW Users

[BbAltered]

Hello. Like a lot of people here, I use a DAW (Reaper and CW by BandLab). Sometimes, I need to know the duration of a a certain number of beats, or I need to find the tempo of an audio clip, or figure how many beats fit into a given amount of time.

 

So I tried to develop a formula to link tempo, number of beats, and duration of time.

 

Here is my formula: [tempo/60,000] = [b/ms]

where tempo = tempo in bpm; b = number of beats, and ms = duration in ms.

 

This formula allows me to calculate the duration in ms of any number of beats of music at a given tempo; OR the tempo of a bit of music when I know the number of beats and the duration of the bit or music; OR the number of beats of a bit of music when I know the tempo and the duration of the bit of music.

 

Ex: my DAW shows me a given clip of audio is 4 sec long, and I count 8 beats in the audio clip: what is the tempo of the music? Plugging it into the formula gives us t/60,000 = 8/4000. Solving for t gives us a tempo of 120 bpm.

 

I hope some find this as useful as I have found it. Have fun.