This tutorial is being created for an assignment where you needed to reverse the audio of a song and have people guess it.  However this tutorial can be used for reversing any audio file that you want.  For this tutorial I will be using the Audacity audio editing program along with the LAME library to export audio as a .mp3.

1. The first step is to select your song.  The easiest way to do this is to find the song on youtube and download it as a .mp3 using this website.

2. Now that you have your audio file you should open your file you Audacity using the “Open…” option under file.

3. Once your audio file is open in Audacity it is a simple task to reverse the audio.  You need to simply go over to “Effect” and look through the list until you find reverse and apply the effect to the entire song. (It will not work if you are playing the song or have the song paused.  It needs to be completely stopped for this to work)

4.  Now your audio file is in reverse, easy right.  Now you just need to export it as a new .mp3 file and to do this you click “Export Audio…” under file and make sure you choose .mp3 and give it a nice name. Now you are done, to complete the assignment that for this tutorial just upload it to your blog and give three nice hints to what the song is. (Also make sure you save it some where you can find it later)

You can use these steps for reversing almost any audio file you have.  You may need to convert your file to a different format to do this but that is simple with online file converters.

Below you will find my audio file for this assignment and links to my blog post for the assignment and the original assignment.

My blog post for this assignment

Original DS106 Assignment

The rumors are true, Audacity is difficult, especially if this is your first time using the application, like myself.This week has been pretty stressful and it’s only Tuesday. I was on the Wire106 Hub and saw this AudioAssignment  done by two fellow classmates so I clicked on the assignment. This seemed really simple AND it is worth 3.5 stars? Please don’t play with my heart like that, DS106. I wanted to start off this week confident so I chose the assignment. I mean, how hard can reversing a song be? Ha! Like i said, i’ve never used Audacity before so I was completely unfamiliar to the whole process. So here we go!

Downloading:

So far this is still my favorite part. Downloading. Why? Because my computer does all the work. When Groom posted the Week 4 To-Do list, I just clicked on the link for Audacity which is right here for you guys. I had to double check which version of OX i have since i use a macbook. Which if you don’t know how to do, just click on the apple in the far left corner of your desktop and click “about this mac” and it will tell you. Yay! done with this step, on to the next.

Opening/Converting:

This is where it got tricky for me. I thought i could simply, key word: simply, open up a song from my itunes and it would magically be accepted into Audacity. Meh, not true. It would open in Audacity, kind of, but i wouldn’t hear a thing when i pressed play. I searched on Youtube for a tutorial on how to fix this, and stumbled upon this gem here. This made it sound really simple, which it is. I just wasn’t aware that i actually had to change the file to an AIFF file, i believe. So just follow that video and you’re all set!

Edit/Reverse:

This part comes in second for being easy. I wanted to mess around with Audacity before googling how to make this song play in reverse, which was successful! So my first instinct was clicking the “Edit” tab. I saw the option of “Reverse” but all of them were gray. I gave up and googled. I mean, why would the option be listed but not available? I found this page that gave me the answer. After i converted the MP3 to the AIFF file, i was eager to see if it would actually play, which it did. But i paused it because i didn’t need to hear the whole song. As the answer states in that link, if you have paused a song, it won’t let you make any effects on it and all you need to do is press “stop” which is the box option near the play button. After I pressed “stop”, those grey options turned black and i pressed reverse! Finally, some success.

Upload:

I rarely have a problem with Soundcloud and that continued when i uploaded the file. It did take a bit longer than my previous recordings but i feel like it’s all about the size of the file. This file was obviously larger than my 20 second recordings. Any who, i uploaded the file and used the appropriate tags. Now i’m done! Here’s the song with some clues!

Clues: 

1. It’s an Man Band

2. They prefer the sand and the west coast

3. A popular song by them involves surfing and the USA

*DISCLAIMER* The photo i chose for this file is misleading. I just like Joy Division so that’s why i chose it. It has nothing to do with this song.

Hey guys so I decided to do my second tutorial on reversing audio. This tutorial, like the assignment is for beginners. Please do not be overwhelmed. This is one of the simplest things you could learn. Which I did not know when I started the process. But the first thing you should do is download audio editing software. I used Audacity for this assignment. After you have downloaded the correct software, choose any audio file that you would like to reverse. When you open it in Audacity it will look like this:

Okay so relax it looks like a lot but its not. That is just what the sound file looks like. Next you have to select a portion or the whole file by clicking and dragging or hitting ctrl+a.

From there you go to effect and click reverse.

The file should not be playing while you are doing all of these steps. Finally go to the file tab and click export!. Then you are done. From there you can upload the file to soundcloud or put it straight on your blog.

I am also attaching an audio file of a voice recording for those of you who need to hear a voice and not just read!