Help & Features
Everything WavSnap can do, explained. Click through to the editor to try any feature — no signup needed.
Getting Started
Load audio
Drag and drop any audio file (MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, M4A up to 100MB) onto the canvas or use the drop zone. Media stays on your device during normal editing and export. No audio? Click 'Try with demo audio' to generate a sample beat instantly. You can add up to 10 audio segments — trim each individually, drag to reorder, and they merge into a single track.
Trim & clip
Use the orange handles on the bottom timeline waveform to set your start and end points. Only the selected region is exported.
Play & preview
Press Space to play/pause. The canvas shows a real-time preview of your final video with all layers and effects.
Layers (Sidebar → Layers Tab)
Text layers
Add up to 10 text layers. Style and animate each one, or make its size or glow react to overall level, bass, mids, highs, or transients. Double-click on canvas to edit inline.
Image overlays
Add logos, artwork, or watermarks, then make their scale or opacity react to the soundtrack. Drag to position and resize with handles. Supports PNG, JPG, SVG, WebP.
Progress bar
Multiple flat, bar, mirrored, wave, circular, dot, and block styles show playback progress with editable played/unplayed colors, opacity, and position.
Audiogram visualizer
Multiple live reactive styles respond to amplitude or frequency content during playback and in exported video. Customize color, size, sensitivity, smoothing, glow, and rotation.
Timer
Shows elapsed time, remaining time, or both. Customizable font, size, color, and position.
Shapes
Rectangles, circles and lines with fill, stroke, rotation, and audio-reactive scale or opacity. Useful for lower-thirds, dividers, frames, and colour blocks behind text.
Captions
Timed captions from AI transcription or an imported subtitle file, with deep styling and karaoke options. See the two Captions sections below.
Layer management
Reorder layers by z-index, toggle visibility, lock layers to prevent accidental moves, rename layers, and duplicate text/image layers. Every layer has an align-preset grid for one-click corner, edge and centre placement.
Canvas (Sidebar → Canvas Tab)
Aspect ratio
16:9 (YouTube), 1:1 (Instagram), 9:16 (Reels/TikTok), 4:5 (IG Post), or custom dimensions. Elements reposition automatically.
Background
Solid color, gradient (with optional animation using up to 4 colors), pattern (dots, lines, grid, noise, particles), or your own image (cover, contain, blur-fill modes).
Visual effects
Vignette, film grain, brightness, contrast, saturation, blur, and border (color, width, radius, inset). Color grading presets: Warm, Cool, Vintage, High Contrast.
Audio (Sidebar → Audio Tab)
Multi-segment merge
Upload up to 10 audio files as named segments (e.g., Intro, Section 1, Outro). Trim each individually, drag to reorder. They merge into a single sequential track automatically.
Volume & speed
Adjust gain (0–200%) and playback speed (0.5x to 2x). Speed changes apply to both preview and export.
Fade in/out
Set fade durations (up to 5s each) for smooth audio transitions at the start and end.
Audio enhancement
Rumble removal (highpass with adjustable cutoff), noise gate, de-esser, dynamic compressor (threshold & ratio), 3-band EQ, mono fold-down, and silence trimming. Presets for Podcast and Music workflows.
Loudness normalisation
EBU R128 two-pass normalisation to a target loudness, so exports land at a consistent level across episodes instead of one clip being noticeably louder than the next.
Templates & Brand Kits
Templates
Curated templates apply a complete visual preset. The featured Reactive Scenes demonstrate bass, level, high-frequency, and transient-driven motion using the same editable layer controls.
Brand kits
Save color palettes (primary, secondary, accent, text, background) as reusable kits. Apply a kit to instantly restyle your project.
Project menu
Name, open, save, save as, or close a portable .wavsnap project. A small amber dot marks changes not yet saved to an archive; New, Open, and Close offer Save, Discard, or Cancel when needed.
Recovery & drag-open
After an interrupted session, WavSnap offers the timestamped auto-save for Restore or Discard. You can also drop a .wavsnap or legacy JSON project anywhere on the editor to open it.
Getting Captions (Sidebar → Captions Tab)
Whisper — on device
Transcribe in the browser with Whisper. Choose Tiny, Base, or Small; larger models are more accurate but require a larger first-time download. The model is cached after that and transcription runs on your device.
Gemini — cloud, optional
Using Gemini sends compressed audio to Google's Gemini API with your key after an explicit confirmation. The web app stores that key in this browser's local storage. Optional extras include speaker labels, keywords, and emoji. Translation sends caption text only.
Extra instructions
A free-text box for the Gemini engine. Use it to steer how the transcript is written — for example, keeping English words in Latin script inside a non-English transcript.
Auto-detect cues
Skip transcription and detect where speech starts and stops. You get empty, correctly-timed cues to type into — useful when you already know the script.
Import SRT/VTT
Upload a standard subtitle file. Overlapping cues, hour-less timestamps, and second-precision timings are all handled.
Start from scratch
Create empty cues manually and type as you go.
Styling Captions (Layers → Captions)
Presets
14 one-click looks: Classic Pill, Bold Outline, Karaoke Box, One Word Pop, Karaoke Fill, Minimal, News Bar, Hormozi, Beast, Lyric Sweep, Read Along, Quote Card, Dual Language, and Podcast. Presets change style only — never your cues or their position.
Display modes
Show a whole phrase, a fixed-size chunk of words, one word at a time, or a flowing paragraph that merges consecutive cues for read-along.
Karaoke highlighting
Highlight the word being spoken with its own colour, weight and scale. Optional progressive fill, a left-to-right sweep, a box behind the active word, and a dimmed tint on words not yet spoken.
Keyword emphasis
Tap any word in the cue editor to mark it as a keyword. Emphasised words get their own colour and size independently of the spoken-word highlight.
Motion
Entrance animation per line (fade, slide up, pop) plus Audio Pulse from either the overall level or detected transients. This is onset response, not BPM or beat-grid detection.
Multiple caption layers
Add several caption layers over the same transcript, each with its own style and position. Filter a layer to one speaker, or use Split by speaker to generate a layer per person automatically.
Speakers & accessibility
Show a coloured speaker name above each line, with a colour per speaker. Readability warnings flag cues that are too long, too fast, or on screen too briefly.
Dual language
Show a translated second line above or below the main caption, with its own colour, size and gap. Pick which language track fills it.
Scripts & direction
Right-to-left text (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu) and mixed-script lines are laid out in correct reading order, with per-script font fallback.
Edit cues
Edit start, end, speaker and text per cue. Split a cue at the cursor, merge with the next, shift all timings, find and replace, auto-split long cues by word count, and bulk-rename a speaker. Add a language track and, with a Gemini key, translate every cue into it in one pass — the original stays untouched, so you can show both at once via Dual language or as two caption layers. Export back to SRT, per language track.
Export
MP4 video
720p, 1080p or 4K with your audio, animated visualizer, all layers and effects. Rendered frame-by-frame in your browser — nothing is uploaded. Longer clips and 4K need more memory; if an export fails, try a shorter clip or a lower resolution.
WebM video
VP9 + Opus, as an alternative to MP4. Often smaller at the same quality, and preferred by some platforms.
Batch MP4
Render the same project to several aspect ratios in one pass — Story (9:16), YouTube (16:9) and Square (1:1) — so one edit covers every platform.
PNG thumbnail
A single frame capture — useful for podcast artwork or social media previews. "All PNGs" exports one still per aspect ratio at once.
GIF preview
Animated GIF up to 15 seconds. Great for sharing quick previews on platforms that don't support video.
Processed audio
Export your trimmed, speed-adjusted audio with all enhancement effects (EQ, compression, normalization) baked in.
Canvas Interaction
Drag & drop
Click and drag any unlocked element to reposition. Locked elements let clicks pass through to layers beneath.
Resize handles
Image overlays and waveform show corner/edge handles for resizing.
Snap to grid
Toggle snap (magnet icon) for alignment guides. Grid overlay and safe zone guides available from the canvas toolbar.
Zoom
Ctrl+scroll or use +/- buttons to zoom the preview. Fit button resets to fit the viewport.
Inline text editing
Double-click any text layer on the canvas to edit directly in place.
Privacy & Error Reports
Anonymous page views
The hosted website counts anonymous page views without tracking cookies. It does not send your media, project content, editing activity, or exports.
Incident codes
When an export or the editor fails, you get a short incident code such as WS-K4T9PD. It identifies that one failure and nothing about you.
On-device diagnostics
A failure can produce an incident report containing the app version, browser and operating system, export settings, size ranges, a scrubbed error and a short technical event log. It stays on your device unless you inspect, copy and share it with support.
Never included
Your audio, images, video, project settings, captions, file names and folder paths are never in a report. You can press Copy diagnostics to read the exact contents before sending.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Space
Play / Pause
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z
Undo / Redo. Ignored while you're typing, so text edits undo normally.
Ctrl+E
Open the export dialog
Tab
Cycle through layers on the canvas
Escape
Deselect, or close the current dialog
Arrow keys
Nudge the selected element by 1%
Shift+Arrow keys
Nudge by 5%
1–9 / 0
Set the selected element's opacity (1 = 10%, 9 = 90%, 0 = 100%)
Delete / Backspace
Remove the selected layer
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V
Copy / Paste text layer content
Ctrl+B / Ctrl+Shift+B
Collapse the sidebar / move it to the other side
Ctrl + / Ctrl − / Ctrl+0
Zoom the preview in, out, or reset to fit
Support WavSnap
No account, no watermark, and no upload of your audio. Hosted WavSnap counts anonymous page views without tracking cookies; diagnostic reports stay on your device unless you copy and share one. If WavSnap earned it, a one-off coffee helps cover the time.