Metronome 1.8

Metronome is a nice and useful metronome. It closely mimics a real world clockwork metronome in that it has a bell which you can set to sound at intervals of every 2, 3, 4 or 6 beats.
But because its not a real world clockwork metronome, you can also easily set it to sound a bell on beats 5, 7, 8 and 9, as well as set it to any arbitrary beat you like.
One advantage of Metronome over a real world clockwork one is that you can operate it almost entirely from your computer keyboard. Enter/Return will start or stop it, = (equals key) will speed it up, - (minus or dash key) will slow it down. Press any number key from 2 to 9 to get the bell to sound on those beats, or press 0 (zero) to stop the bell.
Beats of 10 and above are achieved by typing into a small text field and hitting Enter or Return.
Another advantage is that you can set the speed (bpm or beats per minute) as fast or as slow as you like. The slowest speed is 1 beat per minute(!), and the fastest is whatever speed your computer can run at.
This helps a lot if you are practicing something that you want to slowly speed up. No need to put down your instrument to adjust the speed, just hit the equals key and keep playing.
But with Metronome you dont even have to do that. The Accelerator increases the tempo at a rate you control. Why? So you can start a difficult piece slowly, and very gradually speed up without stopping to reset your metronomes tempo. The Accelerator will do it for you. You control the rate of increase AND when it increases and when it stops increasing. Its easy.
Metronome comes with two sounds, a snare rimshot for the click and a cow bell for the bell, but you can change the sounds to any ones you want using the Preferences. When you are choosing new sounds, you can preview/play them first.
Enhancements:
- Added the ability to make the Accelerator slow down as well as speed up. To slow down, simply add a - (minus, or subtract) symbol before the rate of acceleration in the Accelerator panel.
- Added the ability to lock saved settings files to prevent accidental deletion
- Reduced the size of the Accelerator and Tempo Finder panels to increase available screen space.
- Made the bell sound on the first beat of the bar, instead of the last beat(!).
- Fixed a bug Id introduced where the state of checkboxes in the Preferences window werent being saved correctly.
- Added a warning sheet when Metronome first runs to alert the user to the fact that the Metronome may beat unevenly in some cases where the computer has third party non-standard sound hardware.