Is it possible without converting it to a backwards only mp3 with an external program? Soundplay (http://www.xs4all.nl/~marcone/soundplay.html) says it can play MP3 files backwards but isn't available for win32. Thanks for any help you can offer, I haven't been able to find anything in my google and winamp forum searching.

Goldwave will open mp3's and allow you to play at various speeds both forward and backwards. What are you looking for, reverse dubbed satanic messages

play songs backward....wander what kind of sound it produces

anyway, what is the use of playing songs backwards.....can someone tell me why?
i still can't figure out

In some songs there are "hidden" messages recorded backwards

For example at the end of "I'm so tired" by The Beatles you can hear the words "Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him"

Some metal bands hide satanic messages this way, as UART mentioned

LOL... that reminds me about the "it sounded like aliens were trying to communicate with me" in a thread about udial.wav.

- Lyx

edit: hmm, i should try to play some of the tracks from "Flying Saucer Attack" backwards.

So there is no Soundplay type player for win32? Goldwave is more an editor, I was hoping for something I could enqueue files into so I could listen to a whole CD backwards without much trouble. As for why, I just want to A lot of songs sound good backwards but it takes so much time to use Goldwave to listen to a whole album.

I'm suprised no one here has a plugin or addon for Foobar or Winamp.

I asume the problem is, that most decoder-components of audio-players are build to play forwards. DSPs and Plugins usually only have access to the stream which gets outputted, but no direct control on how the audio gets decoded. So, to have backwards playback, someone would need to create a new decoder-component, not just a plugin.

really?....cool I don't even know there is such a thing.

any other example besides the song from beatles

"Linda and I both feel strongly about animal rights. In fact, if you play 'Maybe I'm Amazed' backwards, you'll hear a recipe for a really ripping lentil soup." - Paul McCartney.




The process is known as "backward masking", and it's basically where they take some speech, reverse it, and stick it in the background track or something. Usually it's pretty obvious. There's also so-called "natural" backwards masking, where normal forward speech sounds like something else when played backwards. This is usually unintentional, and is pretty obvious when you hear it.

Judas Priest actually got sued for backwards masking once. There's quite a few in their albums, I think.

As for the most famous song to have backwards words in it, look no further than Stairway to Heaven. Some Baptists made a big deal about Led Zep being tools of the devil back in the early 80's because of the "messages" in this song. These are all fairly clearly unintentional because of the way Plant's voice moves, but there are definitely there and fairly easy to hear as well. Start at the end. The "Play backwards, hear words sung" message is one of the easiest to hear and the best.

There are those that argue that unintentional reversals like these reflect thoughts of the subconcious, but very few people pay attention to this, since it's clearly bunk.

It's somewhat shocking that there's anyone out there who hasn't heard of this. Backmasking has a long and storied tradition in Rock and Roll. A few songs have intentional backwards messages, but most are accidental, and "back in the day" was enough to have a bunch of wackos try to ban your recrod for corrupting the youth. Part of "Stairway to Heaven" famously sounds like "my sweet satan" backwards (and a longer phrase if you listen very carefully). Actually, for some reason, lots of English words/phrases sound like "satan" when played backwards. This page has a bunch of good examples of all sorts of backwards messages in music. The AC/DC "Dirty Deeds" and Queen "Another One Bites the Dust" ones are the best IMO.

They Might Be Giants has a number of songs with backwards recorded stuff in them. IIRC one is just a reverse of them babbling in gibberish. They also have a way of singing in a few songs that sounds like it's a backwards recording but isn't. The song "On Earth My Nina" is a regular, (mostly) intelligible recording (sung strangely) that is meant to sound what another, more ordinary song "Thunderbird" sounds like when played backwards. The phrase "on earth my nina" is what "I remember now" sounds like in reverse. "On Earth My Nina" was actually released on their internet-only album "Long Tall Weekend" years before they even started performing "Thunderbird" in concert (their most recent album, "The Spine", released a few months ago is the first "official" recording of "Thunderbird".)

"I'll Sink Manhattan" is another song from TMBG with backwards messages - in this case, a recording from the NYPD left on their dial-a-song answering machine. It isn't an answering machine anymore, but you can still get free music at 718-387-6962.

Interestingly, I accidentially discovered that the phrase "yeah right" sounds exactly the same forward and backwards, espescially if spoken with the doubtful tone in which that phrase is normally used. The way you said it right now when you read this is perfect. Seriously, this isn't one of those "gullible isn't in the dictionary" things. Anyhow, I don't know of any other phrases that sound the same backwards, but they probably exist. Sorta an "audio palindrome".

I'd imagine some kinds of mp3 artifacts might be more audible when played backwards, e.g. the post-masking effect after sharp attacks is stronger and has longer duration than the pre-masking effect. Because of that, a smart encoder would introduce more noise after an attack than before, and this might be detectable if you play it back in reverse.

<pedant>Actually the term "backward masking" is often, but incorrectly, used to describe this effect. The scientific term was misappropriated by those who wanted to "expose" this musical effect. See the site "Backward Masking" for more information.</pedant>

That's likely most cases of "backmasking". I've listened to several of these "hidden messages" and could not discern a thing until I was told what was supposed to have been said.

There's an excellent Wikipedia article on the subject, with links to examples.

This all reminds me of a few years ago when someone I meet was ranting about "satanic messages" backward dubbed into many songs and gave "The Eagles - Hotel California" as a example. When you play the part that goes "there were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say-ay" it kind of sounds like "Yeah Satan had us, oh he organized his own religion, yeah would he know ssh-shit."

You can listen to it over at the link posted above by phong, they have slightly different words to me but what I wrote is more like what it sounds to me. Like it says on that site, all this stuff is almost certainly unintentional and just due to the fact that,
1. lots of words (or part -words etc) sounds somewhat intelligible as other words when played backwards.
2. People have good imagination and ability to map even a slightly intelligible sound to the "nearest actual word".

Anyway the funny thing was that when I first heard this backwards "Hotel California" passage I turned on my mic and sung those words "Yeah Satan had us ...." in roughly the same tune as how the backwards passage sounded to me. Hehe, when I played it in reverse it sounded almost exactly like Stephen Hawkings (the Blackhole hunting muscular dystrophy suffering theoretical Physicist) singing Hotel California.

I'm particularly fond of the Stone Roses' back-to-back "Waterfall" and "Don't Stop" on their self-titled first album. "Don't Stop" sounds somewhat like a backwards version of "Waterfall" - and I've reversed it to check it out.

If you have nothing to do there is always volunteer work for a worthwhile cause.

If you're playing your records backwards, you ARE Satan.

Man, i dont think I have patience to do such a thing!!

I believe there are secret messages, but a lot of them are manipulated. You hear "anan" and people say the singer is calling "satan".

The Sisters of Mercy - "Burn" has another instance of the chorus and an entirely new verse when played backwards:

After we complete the ring of fire,
We will burn this circus down,
The wheel goes round and the flames get higher
Round the juggling men and the idiot clown

Actually, it wasn intentionally done until the Judas Priest trial, where it was proved that there were lots and lots of songs that had the same occurance, that is, seemingly embedded messages when played backwards. It stems from english being a limited set of sounds, so eventually youre going to put them in ways that make sense one way, and reverse.