WatchTimegrapher is a free, independent hobbyist tool that estimates a mechanical watch's rate (seconds fast/slow per day) and beat error (ms) from the sound of its ticking, picked up by your device's microphone and analyzed entirely in your browser.
You hold a running mechanical watch near your microphone, and the tool captures the audio, runs it through a high-pass filter to isolate the tick's sharp transient click from room noise, detects each individual tick using an envelope-follower and adaptive-threshold peak-picking algorithm, and measures the timing between ticks. From those timestamps it computes how the watch's actual ticking rate compares to the theoretical rate for its stated beat frequency (rate, in seconds/day) and how symmetric the alternating tick/tock gaps are (beat error, in milliseconds). Full methodology is on the homepage's How It Works section.
Watch hobbyists and collectors who want a quick, free, rough check on how a mechanical watch is running, without buying a dedicated timegrapher machine; anyone curious what "beat error" or "rate" actually means and wants to see it measured on their own watch.
Every recording is captured and analyzed entirely on your own device — nothing is uploaded to, or stored on, our servers. See the full privacy policy for the complete picture.
Questions, corrections, or feedback: support@watchtimegrapher.com