Reverse audio play any sound backwards

Reversed cymbals and vocals as a build-up in music production, backwards speech for a sound effect, or simply checking what a track sounds like the other way round. Feed a video in and you get the reversed soundtrack as an MP3 without the picture.

Reversing itself is lossless — the samples come out in the opposite order, nothing is thrown away. The result is written as a high-bitrate MP3, which is transparent for both music and speech.

Your file is uploaded to our own machine, reversed there, and deleted immediately afterwards. Limit: 400 MB.

It's not just that the words come out in the wrong order — a single reversed syllable already sounds alien, and there's a real reason for that. Speech is built from sounds that are not symmetrical in time: a hard consonant like a "t" or a "p" is a sharp attack followed by a fade, and a trailing "s" is a hiss that tapers off. Reverse the recording and that attack becomes a slow swell into a sudden stop, and the trailing hiss becomes a rising one at the start of the sound instead of the end. None of those shapes exist naturally in any language, which is exactly why reversed voices read as uncanny rather than simply "backwards" — the ear is hearing sound envelopes it has never encountered forwards.

Recording something and playing the tape backwards to hear what falls out is an old studio trick, decades older than this page, and reversed cymbal swells and vocal snippets still turn up in music production for exactly the "swelling into a hit" effect a normal recording can't produce forwards. This tool does the same operation without a tape deck: drop in the track, and what would have taken physically flipping a reel now happens in a browser tab.