TaktDock: a metronome for the Windows taskbar

TaktDock is a free, open source metronome app for Windows 10 and 11 that lives on the taskbar. Pick a tempo and a time signature, press play, and keep practising guitar, bass, drums, piano or voice without switching windows. It floats just above the taskbar or pins right into it next to the clock, it never steals keyboard focus from your DAW, tab viewer or video, and its click is sample accurate.

_{Floating above the taskbar. The desktop around it is an illustration; the widget is the real interface.}

_{Pinned into the taskbar strip, left of the notification area.}

Download the latest release or install it with one line of PowerShell, below.

• Why a taskbar metronome
• Features
• Screenshots
• Install
• Using it
• Sounds
• Accent colour
• Audio interfaces, ASIO and exclusive mode
• Command line
• Configuration
• FAQ
• Performance
• Privacy
• Architecture
• Support the project
• Credits
• License

A metronome on the phone is a second screen to look at and a device that goes to sleep in the middle of a take. A metronome in a browser tab means switching to it every time the tempo changes, and a tab stops keeping good time the moment it is out of sight. A plugin in a DAW is overkill for twenty minutes of scales.

The tempo belongs where the clock is: always visible, one click or one scroll away, and never in front of the thing you are actually reading. TaktDock is that and nothing more.

• Tempo from 30 to 300 BPM. Scroll anywhere on the widget for one step, hold Shift for five, drag the slider, or tap tempo with four clicks. Tap tempo averages the last four intervals and starts over after a two second pause. Presets from 60 to 180 BPM are in the tray menu.
• Time signatures 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 6/8 and 7/8, with the first beat accented (you can turn the accent off). Click the meter to step to the next one, right click it for the whole list.
• Subdivisions: none, eighths, triplets and sixteenths. The clicks between beats play quieter, so the beat stays the beat.
• Three sounds: a classic click, a woodblock and a hi-hat, all synthesised in the app. More below.
• Sample accurate timing. Clicks are counted in audio samples on a real time audio thread, never timed by the interface. A thousand beats in, a click is still on the exact sample it should be on. A new tempo takes effect on the next click, a new subdivision on the next beat and a new meter on the next bar, so a bar is never cut off halfway.
• Choose the output device. System default, or any output by name: your USB audio interface, headphones, speakers. If the chosen device disappears (the interface is unplugged, or a DAW takes it over), TaktDock falls back to the default output within two seconds, tells you in the tray, and switches back on its own when the device returns.
• Never steals focus. Clicking the widget does not take the keyboard away from the window you are working in, and it does not show up in Alt+Tab.
• Gets out of the way of games and videos. It hides while a fullscreen app is in front, including borderless games and fullscreen video, and comes back when it closes. With more than one monitor it only hides for something that fills its own screen. The sound never stops; hiding is only about the picture.
• Two placements. A floating widget docked to the corner of the screen, or pinned into the taskbar left of the clock, in a normal or a compact size. Monitors are remembered by identity, not coordinates, so unplugging a display or changing the scaling cannot strand it off screen.
• Any accent colour. The turquoise is only the default; pick any colour you like from a colour square, type a hex value, or start from a preset. The tray icon follows.
• Light and dark theme following Windows automatically, or forced from the menu. Honours the reduced motion setting.
• Updates itself when you say so, with an installer signed by a key compiled into the app. Nothing is downloaded or installed without a click.
• Light on the machine: about 30 MB of memory and well under one percent of one CPU core while playing. Measured figures.

Floating, dark	Floating, light

_{Expanded: a sweep across each bar with its number, the output device that is playing, the volume (scroll it) and the sound (click to switch).}

Pinned	Pinned, compact

_{Both pinned sizes fit a standard 48 pixel Windows 11 taskbar and a small 36 pixel one.}

Any accent colour	The colour picker

Requirements: Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64 bit. The WebView2 runtime that ships with Windows 11 and current Windows 10 is used; the installer fetches it if it is missing.

The fastest way is one line in PowerShell:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kalaylienes/taktdock/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

It downloads the latest installer from the releases page and runs it silently. The install is per user, so there is no administrator prompt, and TaktDock starts when it is done. You can also download TaktDock_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe yourself and run it, or take the portable zip, which is just taktdock.exe.

The app is not code signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may warn the first time you run it. Choose More info, then Run anyway, or build it yourself and read the code first.

1. Install the tools once. In PowerShell:

   winget install --id Git.Git -e
   winget install --id OpenJS.NodeJS.LTS -e
   winget install --id Rustlang.Rustup -e
   winget install --id Microsoft.VisualStudio.2022.BuildTools -e --override "--quiet --wait --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.VCTools --includeRecommended"

   Open a new terminal afterwards so the new tools are on the PATH.

2. Get the code and its dependencies:

   git clone https://github.com/kalaylienes/taktdock.git
   cd taktdock
   npm install

3. Build the installer:

   npm run app:build

   The first build compiles every Rust dependency and takes several minutes; later ones take one or two. The result is src-tauri\target\release\bundle\nsis\TaktDock_1.0.0_x64-setup.exe. No signing key is needed; only official releases carry a signed update package.

4. Run the installer. TaktDock is installed to %LOCALAPPDATA%\TaktDock and appears in the Start menu. Or skip the installer and run src-tauri\target\release\taktdock.exe directly.

To try it without installing anything, npm run app:dev starts it from the source tree with live reload of the interface.

• The widget appears in the bottom right corner, above the taskbar.
• Windows 11 hides new tray icons behind the ^ arrow. Drag the TaktDock icon onto the taskbar so it stays visible; it is the quickest way to the menu.
• To start TaktDock with Windows, turn on Start with Windows in the menu.

Settings → Apps → Installed apps → TaktDock → Uninstall, or run %LOCALAPPDATA%\TaktDock\uninstall.exe. Your settings stay in %APPDATA%\TaktDock; delete that folder too to remove every trace.

The dots under the slider are the beats of the bar. The one that just sounded lights up, the downbeat in a brighter tone, and fades over the beat. The animation is timed to when the click leaves the speaker, not to when it was computed, so the light and the sound arrive together.

The icon is grey while stopped and turns your accent colour while playing. Its tooltip reads the tempo, the time signature, and anything wrong with the output.

• Floating (the default): 300 pixels wide, docked 12 pixels in from the right edge and 8 above the taskbar. Drag the left edge to move it anywhere; Monitor → Reset position puts it back. Expanded adds a bar sweep and the output row.
• Pinned to the taskbar: sits inside the taskbar strip, left of the notification area. Compact makes it narrower by dropping the slider row. TaktDock never becomes part of the taskbar itself; it only reads where the taskbar is, so restarting Explorer cannot break it and it reserves no space.
• A vertical taskbar has no room for the strip, so pinning falls back to floating there.

The accent on the downbeat is 3 dB louder than the beat, and clicks between beats sit at 60 percent. Volume goes from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic curve spanning 40 dB, so every step is audible: 50 is 25 dB below full, quiet but clearly there, instead of a slider whose lower half does nothing. Every sound is synthesised when the stream opens, so there is no sample library to download and nothing to license.

Appearance → Accent colour... opens the picker.

• Drag in the square for saturation and brightness, along the strip for the hue. The widget repaints as you drag and saves when you let go.
• Type a hex value such as #f28c38 or f80 and press Enter.
• Pick one of the presets.
• Default goes back to the original turquoise. Cancel or Escape puts back the colour the window opened with.

Any colour is allowed, black and white included. The chosen colour is used exactly as picked; the darker end, the bright core and the glow of the bars are derived from it, and the text on tinted pills is adjusted separately for the light and dark themes so it always stays readable.

TaktDock plays through WASAPI in shared mode, the same way a browser or a music player does. It does not use ASIO.

Most USB audio interfaces (Focusrite Scarlett, M-Audio, Behringer, PreSonus and others) accept shared mode output alongside everything else, and the click simply plays through the interface into your headphones along with your instrument.

When a DAW opens the same interface through ASIO, many drivers give it to the DAW exclusively, and nothing else can play through the interface until the DAW lets go. In that case you can:

• use the DAW's own metronome while recording, or
• choose a second output for TaktDock in Output device: the computer's speakers or a separate pair of headphones.

Some drivers, RME and a number of Focusrite models among them, allow several clients at once, and then both work together. When the chosen output cannot be opened, TaktDock plays on the system default instead and says why in the menu and the tooltip.

Output latency is whatever Windows shared mode gives the device, typically 10 to 30 ms. It is constant, so it does not affect playing along; it only matters if you try to line TaktDock up with another clock.

The first four reach the copy that is already running, so they work from a script, a hotkey tool such as AutoHotkey, or a Stream Deck button. When nothing is running, they start TaktDock and then do the same.

Running taktdock.exe a second time never starts a second copy; it brings the widget back.

Everything in the menus is saved to %APPDATA%\TaktDock\settings.json. You can edit it by hand while TaktDock is closed; a byte order mark from Notepad is fine, and anything out of range is brought back into range.

TAKTDOCK_DATA_DIR moves the whole data folder, so a second copy can run beside an installed one without sharing settings.

A metronome is something you open when you practise, so nothing restarts it by default. If you want it back whenever it stops, there is an optional watchdog:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts/install-watchdog.ps1

It registers a scheduled task that starts TaktDock at sign in and checks once a minute afterwards. The task runs taktdock.exe --watchdog itself, never a script, so it can never flash a console window over a fullscreen game. Quitting from the menu is respected. Remove it with -Remove.

Is TaktDock free? Yes. It is open source under the GPL, with no ads, no account and no telemetry. If it helps your practice, you can buy me a coffee.

Does it work on Windows 10? Yes, Windows 10 and Windows 11, 64 bit.

How accurate is the timing? The clicks are placed by counting samples on the audio thread, the same way a DAW does, not with timers. The tests check that after a thousand beats at any tempo from 30 to 300 BPM, at 44.1, 48 and 96 kHz, no click has moved by even one sample.

Can I use it with my audio interface while recording? Yes, as long as the interface accepts shared mode output while your DAW is running. If your DAW holds it exclusively through ASIO, use the DAW's click or give TaktDock another output. See Audio interfaces.

Will it interrupt my game or my video? No. It never takes focus, it hides while a fullscreen app fills its screen, and it waits five seconds after the app closes before coming back, so it can not pull a game out of fullscreen. The sound keeps playing throughout.

Why can I not type into the widget? On purpose: a window that takes the keyboard would steal it from whatever you are working in. Use the wheel, the slider, tap tempo or the menu. The accent colour picker is a normal window and does take the keyboard.

Does it have a keyboard shortcut? Not built in yet. Until it has, bind taktdock.exe --toggle to a key in AutoHotkey, PowerToys or your keyboard software.

Does it run on macOS or Linux? Not yet as a release. The code builds on Linux and CI checks it on every push; Linux packages are planned for version 1.1. macOS is not planned.

Where are the logs? %APPDATA%\TaktDock\logs. Diagnostics → Save report puts everything useful for a bug report in one file next to them. If the app ever crashes, last-crash.txt in the same folder names the place and the thread.

Measured on a release build over a minute each, playing 120 BPM at 48 kHz on a USB interface, with --diagnose for the audio figures:

The audio callback copies prepared samples and nothing else: no locks, no memory allocation, no logging. The stream closes three seconds after stop, so an idle TaktDock does not keep an interface awake. The beat animation runs on the compositor and stops while the widget is hidden or a game is in front.

• No account, no analytics, no telemetry.
• The only network request is the update check to GitHub, once every six hours, which you can turn off in Diagnostics → Check automatically.
• Settings and logs stay in %APPDATA%\TaktDock.
• TaktDock reads window positions to know when something is fullscreen. It does not read other programs' memory, inject anything or hook any graphics API, so it is safe alongside anti cheat.

src/                    widget interface and the colour picker
src-tauri/src/
  audio/clock.rs        where the clicks go, counted in samples
  audio/voice.rs        what they sound like
  audio/engine.rs       the stream, the device and the beat events
  control.rs            every change to the metronome goes through here
  monitor.rs            monitor identity and taskbar geometry
  window.rs             placement, visibility, fullscreen, motion permission
  tray.rs               tray icon and menus

The sound is made in Rust rather than with Web Audio in the webview, for three reasons. The widget is hidden behind every fullscreen app, and a hidden page has its timers throttled. Starting from the tray is not a user gesture, so a browser would refuse to start audio. And listing output devices by name from a web page needs microphone permission, which a metronome has no business asking for.

Tests:

npm test             # interface tests through Playwright
npm run test:rust    # clock, sound, settings and placement unit tests
npm run docs:shots   # regenerates the images in this README

# Opens the real default output at volume zero and checks the timing on it
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml --lib live_output -- --ignored --nocapture

To build on Linux, install the toolkit and ALSA development packages first:

sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev \
  librsvg2-dev libxdo-dev libasound2-dev patchelf

TaktDock is free and stays free. If it keeps you in time, you can support its development here:

Bug reports and ideas are welcome in issues. A star helps other musicians find it.

• The window placement, fullscreen detection and tray skeleton come from FluxDock, a usage widget by the same author.

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.