Jan
18
18
How to Play Songs Backwards
As more and more indie lyrics have been added to indilean I’ve run into a couple songs that have backwards messages in them. This is called Backmasking or “backwards masking” and in order to properly decipher the lyrics I need to play the music backwards. It took a while to figure this out but it’s not actually that hard, just below is a video outlining the five easy steps and below that is the code you will need and a few songs with backwards messages.
How to play a song backwards on a Mac using iTunes:
- Use Finder to navigate to Home/Library/iTunes/ and create a new folder called “Scripts” if one isn’t already there
- Copy the code just below
- Use Spotlight Search to find the Script Editor program and launch it
- Paste in the code you copied earlier and save it as “Play Backwards” in the Home/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder that we created in step one
- Now, open the song you want to play backwards in iTunes, get to the part of the song you want to hear and use the script icon at the top to access the Play Backwards command and it will automatically launch Quicktime and begin from where you were
Code to paste into Script Editor:
--first, pause iTunes and get the current playback location
tell application "iTunes"
pause
--get the current track
set my_track to location of current track
--remember where the playback head is
set my_seconds to player position
end tell
--second, open QuickTime and start playing
tell application "QuickTime Player"
--open the iTunes file
open my_track
set my_movie to first movie
--go to where we left off in iTunes
set ts to time scale of my_movie
set current time of my_movie to my_seconds * ts
--start playing backwards
set rate of my_movie to -1
end tell
tell application "iTunes"
pause
--get the current track
set my_track to location of current track
--remember where the playback head is
set my_seconds to player position
end tell
--second, open QuickTime and start playing
tell application "QuickTime Player"
--open the iTunes file
open my_track
set my_movie to first movie
--go to where we left off in iTunes
set ts to time scale of my_movie
set current time of my_movie to my_seconds * ts
--start playing backwards
set rate of my_movie to -1
end tell
| Artist & Album | Song | Location |
|---|---|---|
Circa Survive |
House of Leaves (Meet Me in Montauk) |
14 min 4 sec |
| Pink Floyd The Wall |
Empty Spaces | 1 min 21 sec |
| The B-52s Bouncing off the Satellites |
Detour Thru Your Mind | 4 min 53 sec |
| Bob & Doug McKenzie The Great White North |
Black Holes | 1 min 26 sec |
| Insane Clown Posse The Amazing Jeckel Brothers |
Echoside | 2 min 31 sec |
| Led Zeppelin IV |
Stairway to Heaven | 4 min 42 sec |
| Styx Kilroy Was Here |
Heavy Metal Poisoning | 0 min 6 sec |
| Electric Light Orchestra Face the Music |
Fire on High | 0 min 28 sec |
| “Weird Al” Yankovic In 3D |
Nature Trail to Hell | 3 min 46 sec |
| “Weird Al” Yankovic Bad Hair Day |
I Remember Larry | 3 min 18 sec |
Comments
Jan 3, 2011
for those of you who get the syntax error and really want this to work there are a few more steps that need to be done. it doesn’t really fix the problem but it allows you to play the song backwards.
1. find where it says “set my_movie to first move”
2. put an underscore between first move (first_move)
3. find set ts to time scale of my_movie (two lines below it)
4. save
5. open i tunes play song and run program. the song should stop and a box will appere. click arrows to control the song