How to Pitch Shift Audio in Your Browser
Shift audio up or down in pitch while the tempo stays fixed. Useful for matching keys, fine-tuning, and practicing with transposed recordings.
What 'Pitch Shifting' Means
Pitch shifting moves every frequency in a recording up or down by the same ratio, while keeping the duration constant. A C4 note (261.63 Hz) shifted up a semitone becomes C#4 (277.18 Hz). Shift a whole song up a semitone and every note in the song moves up the same amount — the song is now in a new key. Unlike a simple sample-rate change (which couples pitch and tempo), pitch shifting uses a time-stretch algorithm under the hood to preserve speed. This is what separates a real pitch shifter from a chipmunk effect.
Step 1: Load Your File
Drag an audio file onto loope.studio. MP3, WAV, FLAC, and OGG all work. Files process locally in your browser — nothing uploads. File size limit is practical, not policy: anything up to a few hundred MB loads fine. Full-album length WAV files may need more browser memory than older devices have.
Step 2: Use the Pitch Slider for Semitones
The Pitch slider sets the shift in semitones (-12 to +12). One semitone is the smallest step in standard Western tuning — it's a piano key's worth. • +1 shifts everything up one half-step • -12 shifts the entire track down one octave • 0 is original pitch Move the slider, hit Play. The pitch shift applies immediately. Most shifts ±6 semitones sound natural; larger shifts can audibly degrade.
Shift audio pitch in loopeStep 3: Use Fine Tune for Cents
The Fine Tune slider adds ±50 cents on top of the semitone shift. 100 cents equals one semitone, so this is sub-semitone precision — useful for: • Matching a recording made in a non-standard tuning (A=432 vs A=440 is about 30 cents) • Lining up two recordings that are slightly out of tune with each other • Pitch-correcting a detuned guitar without retuning the instrument
Step 4: Export at the New Pitch
Click Export. Pick WAV (lossless), MP3 (small and universal), FLAC (lossless compressed), or OGG (open-source lossy). The exported file has the pitch shift baked in — it plays back at the new pitch on any device without loope. You can load it into a DAW, burn it to CD (does anyone do that anymore?), or drop it into your music player.
Try it now in Loope
Drop a track. Slow it down. Loop the tricky part. Change the key. All in your browser — no upload, no signup.
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Frequently Asked Questions
No. loope decouples pitch and tempo, so shifting pitch doesn't touch the duration. A 3-minute song stays 3 minutes regardless of how much you shift it.
Speeding up changes tempo; pitch shifting changes key. They're separate sliders. Old-school sample-rate changes did both at once (slower = lower), but modern algorithms let you adjust each independently.
Pitch shifting by an octave is the hardest case for the algorithm — especially on vocals, where formants (resonant frequencies that define vowel sounds) also shift and create a 'chipmunk' or 'demon' effect. Smaller shifts (±3 semitones) sound much more natural. Specialized formant-preserving pitch shifters exist, but loope's general-purpose shifter doesn't include that feature yet.
Not directly. The slider applies to the whole file. For section-specific shifts, cut the section out first (e.g., with a cutter tool), then shift it, then piece it back together.
Slightly — any time-domain processing introduces some artifacts. In practice, the loss is inaudible for shifts ±3 semitones and tolerable up to ±6. Beyond that, the algorithm is doing real work and you'll hear it.