One recipe.
Every step
in time.

What a BPM list actually is

Think of a normal playlist as a fixed list of songs. A BPM list is the opposite: a set of rules. You describe the kind of music you want — “running at 175 steps per minute, drawn from my whole library, about 30 minutes of it” — and Run2Beat assembles a matching set for you. Change the rules and the list reshapes itself.

A recipe bundles six things together: an activity, a target BPM, a pitch tolerance, your multiplier settings, how much music you want, and where the songs come from. Together they decide which tracks Run2Beat picks — and how they sound while you move.

1. Activity — a sensible starting point

Every recipe starts with an activity, and each one pre-loads a recommended cadence so you’re never staring at a blank slider:

• Walk — around 110 BPM.
• Powerwalk — around 135 BPM.
• Running — around 175 BPM.
• Cycling — around 90 BPM.

Picking an activity sets the matching icon and a sensible target tempo. From there every value is yours to fine-tune — the activity is just a head start, not a lock.

2. Target BPM — your step cadence

This is the single most important number in the recipe: the rhythm your feet should follow, in steps per minute. Many runners settle somewhere in the 170–180 range; a brisk power-walk often lands around 130. You can dial anything from 60 to 220 BPM.

Everything else in the recipe exists to serve this number — to find music that can land on it, and to nudge tracks onto it cleanly during playback.

3. Max pitching — how far a song may bend

Very few songs sit at exactly your target tempo. Max pitching is the tolerance that decides how much Run2Beat is allowed to digitally speed up or slow down a track so its beat lines up with your cadence. It runs from 0 % up to 15 %, and the default is a conservative ±5 %.

The trade-off is simple and worth understanding:

• Small tolerance (under 5 %) — the tempo shift is usually imperceptible, vocals stay completely natural, but fewer songs in your library qualify.
• Larger tolerance — many more songs become usable, because a track only has to get within that percentage of your target. The cost is that bigger shifts start to make voices and instruments sound slightly unnatural.

Run2Beat shifts tempo without dropping the pitch into a chipmunk register — but physics still applies, so the wider you open the tolerance, the more a careful ear will notice.

4. Multipliers — how your feet land on the beat

Multipliers are the cleverest part of the recipe, and the one most worth understanding. They decide the relationship between your steps and the song’s beat, which is what lets a single cadence pull in music across a huge range of tempos. There are three, and you can switch on any combination:

1/1 — Normal time (one step on every beat)

The classic, total-sync cadence. One footfall per beat, your movement and the music’s pulse in complete harmony. With 1/1 enabled, Run2Beat looks for songs whose natural tempo already sits close to your target (within your pitch tolerance). Target 175 → it looks for songs around 175 BPM.

2/1 — Double time (two steps on every beat)

Here you take two steps for every single beat of the music. That means Run2Beat can use songs at roughly half your target tempo — perfect for heavy, slower grooves (think hip-hop or reggaeton) that suddenly give you tremendous drive. Target 160 → you can run to beat-heavy songs at around 80 BPM.

1/2 — Half time (one step every two beats)

The mirror image: one footfall for every two beats, so Run2Beat can use songs at roughly double your target tempo. This is how you run to extremely fast, intense music (drum & bass, for example) while still moving in a powerful, controlled rhythm. Target 175 → songs pumping at around 350 BPM become usable.

Throughout, one principle holds: songs always play near their natural tempo — only the beat you choose to step on changes. A 2/1 match isn’t slowed to a crawl; it plays normally while you simply take two steps per beat.

The reason to enable more than one multiplier is reach. With 1/1, 2/1 and 1/2 all on, the algorithm can sweep your entire library and work out, song by song, exactly which relationship makes it fit your feet — whether it’s naturally fast, slow, or right on the money. By default a new recipe runs with 1/1 and 2/1 enabled.

How matching works under the hood

For the curious, here is the exact rule Run2Beat applies to every candidate track. For each multiplier you’ve enabled, it computes the song’s effective tempo and compares it to your target:

• 1/1 compares the song’s own BPM to your target.
• 2/1 compares twice the song’s BPM to your target (so a 80 BPM song reads as 160).
• 1/2 compares half the song’s BPM to your target (so a 350 BPM song reads as 175).

A song qualifies if at least one of those effective tempos lands within your max-pitching tolerance of the target. When several multipliers would all work, Run2Beat keeps the closest match — the one needing the smallest tempo shift — and remembers exactly how many percent it has to nudge that track during playback. That per-track pitch amount is stored so the iPhone and the Apple Watch reproduce identical playback.

5. How much music — play time or track count

A recipe also decides the size of the list, two ways:

• Play time — fill the list to a target duration, set in 15-minute increments (15 min up to 3 hours, default 30 min). Run2Beat keeps adding shuffled tracks until the total reaches your target, so the result is never shorter than you asked for — it may run slightly over to avoid cutting a song.
• Track count — pick a fixed number of songs instead (5 up to 200, in steps of 5, default 20).

Switching between the two modes clears the current selection so the next shuffle is sized correctly for the mode you’re now in.

6. Source — where the songs come from

By default a recipe draws from your whole Library — every imported track is a candidate. Alternatively you can narrow the pool to one or more of your playlists, which is handy when you want a BPM list built only from, say, your “90s Indie” or “Metal” collection.

A couple of sensible rules keep this tidy: choosing playlists automatically unchecks Library, and unchecking the last remaining playlist falls back to Library. If a source playlist later changes or is deleted, the list quietly reverts to the library and is flagged as changed so your Apple Watch knows to re-sync.

7. Shuffle — drawing the actual selection

Once the recipe knows which songs could match, you tap Shuffle to draw the ones that actually land in the list. Run2Beat randomly picks from the eligible pool until your play-time or track-count target is met. Don’t love this draw? Shuffle again for a completely fresh random set — same recipe, different songs.

The selection is concrete and saved with the list, so playback is always the songs you last shuffled in. One thing worth remembering: after re-shuffling, save the list so the new selection is also what syncs to your Apple Watch.

Only trustworthy tempos get picked

A BPM list is only as good as the BPM data behind it, so Run2Beat is careful about what it’s willing to shuffle in. By default, auto-detected tracks whose tempo the analyser wasn’t confident about are excluded from the candidate pool before the shuffle even runs — a single wrong BPM can derail an entire run. The track-matching summary tells you plainly when this happens (“3 with uncertain BPM excluded”).

Tempos you’ve set or corrected yourself are always trusted and always eligible — you’ve explicitly vouched for them. (You can read the full story of how tempo is measured, and what “low confidence” means, on the BPM analysis page.)

Playback — tempo-matched in real time

Press play on a BPM list and Run2Beat always shuffles. As each track comes up it’s nudged onto your target cadence on the fly, by exactly the per-track amount the recipe worked out — so a 168 BPM song and a 182 BPM song both arrive at your feet at, say, 175. Voices and instruments keep sounding natural; it’s the rhythm that locks to you, not the other way around.

The now-playing screen even pulses in time with the target tempo, so the whole app breathes at the pace of your run.

On your Apple Watch

BPM lists come with you when you leave the phone behind. The key difference is when the tempo work happens: instead of pitching tracks live on the watch, Run2Beat renders each song to its target tempo up front during sync and transfers the finished, BPM-adjusted audio. The result on-wrist is no live processing, no battery-hungry DSP, and no risk of distorted vocals — just the right tempo, already baked in. (More on that on the Apple Watch sync page.)

Keeping a list honest after re-analysis

Tempos can change — you might re-analyse a track or correct it by hand. When that happens, Run2Beat walks every BPM list and removes any pinned track whose new tempo no longer fits the recipe. A “175 BPM list” can never silently end up holding a track that drifted to 163. The list always reflects what its recipe promises.

Managing your lists

You can create as many BPM lists as you like and give each one a name. Long-press a list to shuffle-play it instantly, duplicate it as a starting point for a variation, rename it, or delete it. Deleting a BPM list only removes the recipe — every track stays safely in your library.