The long way round

The usual route to a pitch-shifted video is long: download the file, open it in an audio editor, apply a pitch effect, export, and play the result. Each step takes time, and the downloading may not be allowed by the site’s rules. For practice you rarely need any of it.

The shorter way

PitchShed changes the pitch while the video plays. The sound goes from the page into a small audio processor inside the tab and then out to your speakers. Nothing is saved on disk and nothing is sent to a server. Close the tab and the processing is gone; the video on the site is untouched.

How it is done

Browsers have a built-in audio system, the Web Audio API, which lets an extension take the sound of a video element, run it through a processor and play it on. PitchShed does exactly that, with an open-source pitch-shifting library called Signalsmith Stretch, so it works on the page you are on instead of on a copy of it.

What you get, and what you do not

  • Key changes from −12 to +12 semitones, live.
  • No download, no recording and no file to manage.
  • It works in the tab you clicked in, for as long as the tab stays open.
  • It does not work on DRM-protected audio, such as Spotify and Netflix.

It runs in desktop Chrome 116 or newer, and Microsoft Edge works the same way.

Where the processing happens

Everything runs on your computer, in the tab. There is no server in the middle that receives the video or the sound, so the processing works the same on a slow connection as on a fast one, once the video itself is playing.