Spectrogram

The audiophile's X-ray machine

A spectrogram unrolls audio into a picture: time runs left to right, frequency climbs bottom to top on a logarithmic axis (matching how you hear), and brightness shows energy through the scientifically-uniform viridis colormap across a 70 dB dynamic range. Once you learn to read one, you can see kick drums as bright columns, basslines as a thick glowing floor, vocal harmonics as stacked horizontal stripes, and cymbals as a fine mist across the top.

Things worth looking for

• The lossy ceiling — MP3 and AAC cut content above ~16–20 kHz. A hard horizontal shelf near the top is the fingerprint of lossy encoding — and the classic way to expose a "lossless" file that was secretly transcoded from MP3.
• Hum and hiss — a thin unbroken line at 50/60 Hz is mains hum; an even haze across all frequencies is broadband hiss. (Both are exactly what our Noise Reducer removes.)
• Hidden images — some artists have drawn pictures into their spectrograms. Now you can check any track for easter eggs.
• Your own voice, live — switch to microphone mode and whistle: you'll see the fundamental and its harmonics dance in real time.

Click anywhere on a rendered spectrogram to seek playback to that moment — the playhead tracks the audio as it plays. The PNG export saves the full-resolution image for sharing or documentation.

FAQ