Another reason to switch search engines – privacy-centric alternative DuckDuckGo also has a clever little bpm calculator built in.
It’s pretty simple: just set DuckDuckGo as your search engine or head to duckduckgo.com and then type in a bpm. And you get this:
Sure, you could do the same with a calculator, but it’s honestly even quicker to use this at a glance on the phone or an extra window when pondering tape delays and the like.
More quick music tricks
what rhymes with gives you quick rhyming results, in case you’re writing lyrics:
Chord symbol + “guitar tab” (or “ukulele tab”) gives you tablature for a chord:
Note frequency plus a note gives you tuning (A440, but if you need a quick fix for synthesis):
The documentation is hidden at the moment while they’re in “maintenance mode,” but you’ll find other tricks on GitHub for now:
https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/tree/master/share/goodie
See the official doc page: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/instant-answers-and-other-features/
And I went searching for more tips and wound up… finding some from myself, mainly, so here you go:
Why DuckDuckGo?
And you’ll find stuff like this all the time this way, to be honest, which is why I’m hooked.
I’m pretty passionate about DuckDuckGo as a search engine. It began as a sort of “I’ll get more greens in my diet” choice to embrace privacy and stay away from the filter bubble (search results that are matched to you and therefore skew over time). But nowadays I actually find it annoying and distracting to go back to one of the … other brands.
DDG just tends to put less of its own content and weird ad placements and creepy personalized stuff in the way, which means for search mavens you get to content more quickly.
But the fun of this is that there are a lot of clever little tricks built in – more of the nerdy sort than the sometimes garish and cloying stuff you get from Google and Microsoft. (DDG actually leans heavily on Bing, but it’s a lot more pleasant to use in practice.)
Also, ducks with bowties are cool.
Instant Answers are generally useful.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/instant-answers-and-other-features/
Good to know:
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
https://duckduckgo.com/bang (shortcuts)
I would like to say Instant Answers were open source, but it seems as the product has grown, that’s no longer really the case. You will find a DDG GitHub, but the open DuckDuckHack portion seems to be largely abandoned – maybe for the best in a product running this many searches a day.