Clipper script
2020 August 29/6:00 AM
If you want to play your songs backward, there’s a script for that in 42 Astoundingly Useful Scripts and Automations for the Macintosh.Play this song backwards in iTunes
This doesn’t work in the combination of Quicktime Player 10.0 and Snow Leopard 10.6.7. I don’t know at what point it stopped working. It appears to be breaking the music into short frame-like clips, playing the clips forward, but stepping through them backward, making it sound even more disjointed but without revealing the backmasking. That’s just a guess, though. It’s definitely not intelligible any more, and I don’t know how to make it work as seamlessly as this script once did.
I was listening to the B-52’s Detour Thru Your Mind and got to the end where Fred Schneider is clearly speaking backwards. A quick search for a “play me backwards” in iTunes found nothing. A quick search on Google found a Mac OS X Hint for playing a track more quickly, with the comment inside that if you give it a negative number, it will play backwards.
A close look at the script indicated that it was exactly what I needed. The script will open the current track in QuickTime Player, go to exactly where we were in iTunes, and start playing from that point. The only change I had to make was setting the playback rate to a negative number.
[toggle code]
- --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
- -- time scale no longer necessary
- --set ts to time scale of my_movie
- set ts to 1
- set current time of my_movie to my_seconds * ts
- --start playing backwards
- set rate of my_movie to -1
- end tell
Copy this script, paste it into Script Editor, and save it in your iTunes scripts folder as “Play Backwards”. (Enable the Script Menu by using the AppleScript Utility in the AppleScript folder in your Applications folder. Use “Open iTunes Scripts Folder” from the scripts menu in iTunes.)
In your scripts menu you’ll now see your “Play Backwards” script while you are using iTunes. Cue up the end of some vocals you think are backwards, pause, and choose Play Backwards.
For example, cue up to:
| Artist | Album | Song | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| “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 |
You have to know Latin to get the Styx one. The B-52s and Al Yankovic’s Nature Trail to Hell are the funniest.
The Led Zeppelin one is pretty damned weird. Totally fucked up. Unlike the others, it is clearly spoken forwards. But if you see the words in front of you, it’s hard not to hear them in the music. This is most likely an example of how easily the human mind is tricked into finding patterns and sense where none exists.
It’s probably just psychological; you’ll want to listen to it backwards before reading the supposed words. They’re pretty unintelligible (for me, at least) unless I’m looking at the words as I’m listening to them.
Oh, heres to my sweet satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is satan. He’ll give you, give you 666. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad satan.
Update: I got Bob & Doug McKenzie’s Great White North as a gift, and added that to the list.
Second update: There was a better way to get this to show only in iTunes.
Update (April 12 2011): Quicktime Player no longer uses or needs “time scale”, so I’ve removed it.
Update (August 15 2020): 42 Astoundingly Useful Scripts and Automations for the Macintosh includes a script to play music backward.
- 42 Astoundingly Useful Scripts and Automations for the Macintosh
- MacOS uses Perl, Python, AppleScript, and Automator and you can write scripts in all of these. Build a talking alarm. Roll dice. Preflight your social media comments. Play music and create ASCII art. Get your retro on and bring your Macintosh into the world of tomorrow with 42 Astoundingly Useful Scripts and Automations for the Macintosh!
- Listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed
- “I subscribe to far-too-many podcasts now, and I've found that most of the podcasters can actually be cleanly understood even if you speed up their speech by 50%. So, when my iTunes shows that I have 45 minutes left on a podcast, and I'd rather hear that in 30 minutes, I pull down my script menu to reveal and execute the following AppleScript.”
- Backmasking at Wikipedia
- “Backmasking is a recording technique in which a message is recorded backwards onto a track that is meant to be played forwards.”
- Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena
- “Optical illusion sounds pejorative, as if exposing a malfunction of the visual system. Rather, I view these phenomena as bringing out particular good adaptations of our visual system to standard viewing situations. These adaptations are hard-wired in our brains, and thus under some artificial manipulations can cause inappropriate interpretations of the visual scene.”
- Bouncing Off the Satellites•: The B-52s (CD)
- This is a fun album, especially the strange and meandering detour through your mind.
- The Great White North•
- A strange bit of the eighties, this is an entire album of Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis arguing like you and your brother. One of the tracks from this album even hit the charts.
- The Amazing Jeckel Brothers•
- This is one of the better ICP albums, with a very funny talk-show take in “The Shaggy Show” and a weird little thing going on in Echoside and Assassins.
- Led Zeppelin IV•
- One of the classic Led Zeppelin albums, if not the classic. Contains most of the Led Zep songs you’ve heard over and over again: Stairway to Heaven, Black Dog, Going to California, Living Loving Maid, etc.
- Kilroy Was Here•
- This is a fun album, made better because of the concept. Partially made in response to criticism from moral busybodies to earlier albums, I don’t quite get what the story is but it works out. Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto.
- Weird Al in 3D•
- Some of the best Weird Al parodies, from Eat It to (my favorite on the album) Buy Me a Condo.
- Bad Hair Day•
- By this point Weird Al was making fun of things I’d never even heard of (I only, finally, saw Forrest Gump in the last year). But I do enjoy the sick ones like I Remember Larry and The Night Santa Went Crazy.
More AppleScript
- Find all parent mailboxes in macOS Mail
- The macOS Mail app seems to want to hide the existence of mailboxes and any sense of hierarchical storage. These two AppleScripts will help you find the full path to a selected message and open the message’s mailbox.
- JXA and AppleScript compared via HyperCard
- How does JXA compare to the AppleScript solution for screenshotting every card in HyperCardPreview?
- Using version control with AppleScripts
- AppleScripts aren’t stored as text, which makes it impossible to track changes in AppleScript files using version control software such as Mercurial or Git.
- Save clipboard text to the current folder
- Use the Finder toolbar to save text on the current clipboard directly to a file in the folder that Finder window is displaying.
- Adding parenthetical asides to photograph titles on macOS
- Use Applescript to append a parenthetical to the titles of all selected photographs in Photos on macOS.
- 17 more pages with the topic AppleScript, and other related pages
More backmasking
- 42 Astounding Scripts, Catalina edition
- I’ve updated 42 Astounding Scripts for Catalina, and added “one more thing”.
More iTunes
- Catalina vs. Mojave for Scripters
- More detail about the issues I ran into updating the scripts from 42 Astounding Scripts for Catalina.
- Catalina: iTunes Library XML
- What does Catalina mean for 42 Astounding Scripts?
- A present for Palm
- Palm needs a little help understanding XML.
- Getting the selected playlist in iTunes
- It took a while to figure out how to get iTunes’s selected playlist as opposed to the current playlist in AppleScript.
- Cleaning iTunes track information
- Python and appscript make it easy to modify iTunes track information in batches—if you’re willing to get your hands dirty on the Mac OS X command line.
- Five more pages with the topic iTunes, and other related pages
I found satanic subliminal backmasking message in the heavy metal band from USA - CAGE. It is in the CD release HELL DESTROYER - released in 2007 - track no. 10 - Cremation of care. If you play the song backwards you can hear the satanic message: "Rise master. Hail mighty satan! - 4x, We await your arrival. Deliver unto us armageddon."
Valer at 7:27 p.m. March 24th, 2010
Ak4ub