A number of metadata standards have been published in recent years due to the increasing availability of multimedia content and the resulting issue of sorting and retrieving this content. One of the most recent efforts for a well defined metadata description is the ISO/IEC MPEG-7 standard, which takes a very broad approach towards the definition of metadata. Herein, not merely hand annotated textual information can be transported and stored, but also more signal specific data that can in most cases be automatically retrieved from the multimedia content itself. In this publication an algorithm for the automated transcription of rhythmic (percussive) accompaniment in modern day popular music is described. However, the emphasis here is not a precise transcription, but on capturing the “rhythmic gist” of the piece of music in allow a more abstract comparison of musical pieces by their dominant rhythmic patterns. A small-scale evaluation of the algorithm is presented along with an exam...