This tool is especially useful for rhythm practice and explorations. It introduces many capabilities not normally found in metronomes - such as polyrhythms, long bars, syncopated rhythms and so on. You can play all those in an easy and intuitive way - with no need for music notation.

You can play simple and compound rhythms with any number of beats to the bar. You can play any number of rhythms simultaneously to build up polyrhythms - such as three and four beats played simultaneously in the same bar, as is common in African and Indian music. You can also play long bars (hypermeasures) - repeating sequences of different metrical units, even polyrhythmic long bars.

You can also script your metronome. This lets you set it to slowly increase or decrease in tempo automatically, or change rhythm after so many bars, change the instruments, and so on.

Other features include: vary the timing and volume continuously within the bar to give it more of a natural feel. Adjust volumes and times of individual beats by hand. Get a groove from a recording - either automatically or click on the starts of the notes by hand in the audio recording.

Play 5/4, 7/4 etc with the division where you like, using additive rhythms (examples included in the drop list of preset rhythms).

You can use a different midi instrument for each rhythm in a polyrhythm, or to bring out the subdivisions for compound time - or indeed, polyrhythmic compound time. You can also play the beats on melodic instruments, for instance to make pitched metronomes.

The script is easy to use, click on any control to add its instruction to the script - then adjust the time to play it, or with the morph instruction increase or decrease the tempo etc.

Finally, you can use your rhythm to make fractal tunes in the Player or Composer tasks - and by adapting one of the tunes with chords, fit them to a chord progression.

After you download Tune Smithy, look for the Metronome and Polyrhythms task.