Sound Crit Session — listen, note, discuss

Drop an audio file to begin

WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, M4A, OGG — anything your browser can decode.

Nothing is uploaded. The file is decoded in this tab and never leaves your machine.
Notes live in the page only — export them before you close it, and open them again later to carry on.
Running the class discussion? Drop the audio file and everyone's exported .json notes together.

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waveform
spectrogram
your notes

Notes

Tags

Click a tag, or press 1–9 when you're not typing.

Edit tag list

What this is for

A shared coordinate system for talking about a sound. Everyone listens on their own headphones, drops a note wherever something happens, and the class then discusses the same moments — by timecode, not by "the scratchy bit near the end". Created by KC Collins @ sounddr.ca.

The two tabs

Listen & noteone person, one audio file. Play it, press M where something catches your ear, type a comment, tag it, then Export notes — that writes a small .json file. Open that file again later with Open notes to carry on where you left off.
Class viewthe instructor loads the same audio file plus everyone's exported .json files. All the notes merge onto one timeline: the blue strip shows where attention clustered, the list shows every comment labelled Listener 1, 2, 3… in shuffled order, so nobody's name is on screen. Filter by tag, or use Walk the notes to play four seconds around each one in turn.

Keyboard

Spaceplay / pause
Mdrop a note — it lands lag seconds before the key press, so you can hit it just after you hear the thing
Enterin a comment box: done, hands the keyboard back to the timeline (Shift+Enter for a new line). Comments save as you type; there is nothing to submit.
1–9tag the selected note
← →nudge 0.5 s — Shift 5 s, Alt 0.05 s
Lloop the region you shift-dragged · Z zoom to it
+ − 0zoom in / out / whole file

Mouse

clickmove the playhead
dragscrub — audio follows the cursor, back and forth
Shift+dragmark out a region to loop
wheelzoom at the cursor — Shift+wheel pans
numbered pinsclick one to jump to that note; drag it to nudge the timing

Nothing is uploaded, and nothing survives closing the tab — use Export notes.