Grooves
A Groove is a named rhythm you can come back to. Everything you set on the Grooves screen is part of one, and the app always has exactly one Groove open — the working Groove — whether or not it has been saved.
What a Groove holds
| Name | What you called it. Names are unique in your library, ignoring case and surrounding spaces. |
| Tempo | 20–480 BPM. See Tempo. |
| Beats and accents | 1–16 beats, one accent level each. See Beats and accents. |
| Subdivision | 1–8 slots per beat, and the drawn tick pattern for each count you have drawn one for. See Subdivisions. |
| Count in | 0–8 bars. See Count in and timers. |
| Alarm and Pause | Off, or a time each. |
It also carries an id, and the times it was created and last updated.
What belongs to the device instead
These are yours, not the Groove’s. Loading a Groove does not change any of them, and none of them appear in an export file:
- Volume and mute
- The Beat timbre, percussive or tonal
- Appearance — system, light, or dark
- BPM slider resolution, and whether tempo applies while sliding
- What the Pause timer reset button does
- Whether you share anonymous analytics
The rule is that a Groove describes a rhythm, and a rhythm sounds the same on any device. How loud it is, and what it looks like while it plays, are properties of where you are sitting.
The working Groove
Edits apply immediately — there is no edit mode to enter and no change to commit. The working Groove is stored as you go and restored when you next open the app, so closing Metronomo mid-thought does not lose the rhythm you were building.
Until you save it, the working Groove has no name. The header reads Nomo says, “let’s groove!”, and the menu offers Load Groove and Save Groove.
Saving
Save Groove asks for a name. A name already in your library is refused — Metronomo does not keep two Grooves you cannot tell apart.
Once a Groove is saved and loaded, the header carries its name and two buttons appear:
- Save Groove writes your edits back over the saved copy.
- Reset throws your edits away and puts back the Groove as it was last saved.
Both stay disabled until there is actually an unsaved edit, so the screen tells you whether you have diverged without your having to remember.
The menu on a loaded Groove offers more:
| Item | What it does |
|---|---|
| Rename Groove | Changes the name, nothing else. |
| Save as New Groove | Saves the current state under a new name, leaving the original as it was. The name field is offered as Saved from <name>. |
| Delete Groove | Removes it from the library, after a confirmation. |
| Load Groove | Opens the library. |
| Let’s Just Groove | Starts over from the factory default — 120 BPM, four beats, accent on the first — with nothing loaded and nothing to be unsaved against. |
Loading
Load Groove opens your library as a list. Each entry shows its name and its profile —
4 beats · 120 BPM — and marks whether it carries an alarm or a pause.
The Find field filters the list by name. It matches anywhere in the name and ignores
case, so shuf finds Slow Shuffle.
The same screen offers Let’s Just Groove at the top, for when you opened the library and decided you would rather start clean.
Losing work, and not
Three actions on the Grooves screen would throw away unsaved edits: Reset, Load Groove, and Let’s Just Groove. Each stops and asks first — Abandon Unsaved Changes? — and each asks only when there is something to abandon.
The question is asked on the way into the library. The Let’s Just Groove button on the library screen itself acts immediately, on the grounds that you already answered for it to get there.
Grooves live in Metronomo’s private storage on your device. Uninstalling the app — or clearing its storage, on Android — deletes them permanently; there is no cloud copy. That is what Export is for.