How to Make Nightcore (Free Online Nightcore Maker)

If you want to know how to make nightcore, the recipe is short: speed the song up somewhere around 20 to 30 percent and let the pitch rise with it. That's the whole genre. You can do it free in a browser with SoundCraft, ClipCraft's audio editor, which has a dedicated Nightcore effect with presets, a target BPM field, and a live before/after readout. Drop a song in, pick a preset, export an MP3. This post walks through it, plus the two or three settings actually worth touching.

What nightcore actually is

Nightcore started as a pair of Norwegian students speeding up dance tracks in the early 2000s, and the name stuck to the technique: play the song faster so the tempo jumps and the vocal sits higher and brighter. A finished edit usually lands somewhere north of 150 BPM. The vocal takes on that slightly helium, hyper-energetic quality that anime edit channels built a whole subculture on, and that the sped-up remix trend on TikTok later rediscovered.

Here's the part people miss. In classic nightcore the speed and the pitch are the same knob. The originals were made the tape way, by resampling: play the audio faster and every frequency in it rises together. Speed a song up 30 percent and the pitch climbs about 4.5 semitones. Modern software can stretch tempo without touching pitch, but do that and you get a faster song that sounds oddly normal. The chipmunked vocal is not a side effect of nightcore. It is the sound.

How to make nightcore in SoundCraft

1. Create a free account. The editors are free and the Nightcore effect runs entirely in your browser, so this costs no tokens and your song never uploads anywhere.
2. Open SoundCraft. An entry modal asks whether you want a named project or a temporary session; temporary is fine for a one-off edit.
3. Drag your song onto the timeline. MP3, WAV, whatever you have.
4. Open the effects browser (the ☰ button, top right) and click the Nightcore tile. It's the last one in the Audio effects tab.
5. Pick a preset, press play, and nudge the Speed slider to taste.
6. Hit ⬇ Export and download a WAV or MP3.

The moment the effect lands, the workspace opens its control panel and the clip visibly shrinks on the timeline, because the sped-up version genuinely takes less time. My 33-second test loop at 120 BPM became a 25-second loop at 156 BPM before I touched a single control.

The settings that matter

The panel loads on the Classic Nightcore preset: +30% speed, which the readout translates to a 1.30x rate and about +4.5 semitones of pitch rise. There are seven presets in the dropdown (Soft Sped-Up, Classic Nightcore, Hyper Nightcore, TikTok Sped-Up, Chipmunk Pop, Clean Vocal Nightcore, and Manual), and touching any control flips you to Manual automatically. Classic is the right starting point for almost everything. Soft Sped-Up is the one I'd reach for on ballads, where a full +30% turns a singer into a cartoon.

• Target BPM is the field to know about. Type the tempo you want (say, 160) and it sets the speed for you, working from the project tempo. Set the transport BPM to your song's real tempo first so the math lines up.
• Speed goes up to +60%, and Extra Pitch adds up to ±12 semitones on top if you want a chipmunk edit or want to pull a too-shrill vocal back down a touch. To move the pitch without changing the speed, that's a separate pitch shifter.
• The tone section (Brightness, Bass Preserve, Vocal Presence) exists because speeding a song up shifts all its energy toward the treble and thins the low end. Classic adds 1.5 dB of brightness and 1 dB of bass preserve by default, and a safety limiter sits on the output, switched on.

Everything reacts while the song plays. Drag the Speed slider mid-playback and the track catches up about a quarter-second after you stop moving it, so you can hunt for the sweet spot by ear instead of the export-listen-repeat loop older tools force on you. One quirk worth knowing: there's no dry/wet knob on this effect, on purpose. A half-speed copy would drift out of sync with the original within seconds, so it's a clean on/off bypass instead.

Exporting, and making a video for it

The ⬇ Export dialog renders the master mix with the Nightcore effect baked in. You get lossless WAV or a 192 kbps MP3, and the same dialog can post the track straight to the ClipCraft music feedif it's something you're allowed to share (more on that below).

Nightcore has always been a video format as much as an audio one; the classic upload is a single anime still with the song over it. ClipCraft's Video Captions tool has an audio-to-video mode built for exactly this: give it your exported MP3, pick a frame size, set a background color or image, and it renders a real video file, with animated captions if you want lyrics on screen. If you extracted a vocal for a different project before, the same account covers both; the vocal extractoris a separate tool though, and you don't need it here. Nightcore works on the finished song as-is.

Can you post a nightcore of someone else's song?

Make it and blast it in your own headphones: nobody is coming after private edits. Publishing is different. A nightcore of someone else's track is a derivative of their recording, and releasing or monetizing it needs permission from whoever owns it. Plenty of nightcore channels live in the gray zone of content ID claims and takedowns; go in with open eyes. Songs you made yourself, including AI-generated ones from tools like Suno, are yours to speed up and post wherever you like.

That's the whole process: one drop, one click, one slider. SoundCraft is free, the effect is free, and the export has no watermark, so the only real cost is discovering that every song you own sounds 30 percent more urgent now. Sign up free and make your first edit today. Storage for saved projects is the only thing the paid plans would add to this workflow.