Chrome extension

YouTube Music Slowed and Reverb

Play YouTube Music slowed and reverb in real time with a free Chrome extension. Works on music.youtube.com, follows playlists and remembers your settings.

YouTube Music is where most people actually listen to full albums and playlists, and it is the platform where a live slowed + reverb effect makes the most sense. You press play on an album, the Slow & Reverb for YouTube extension applies your settings, and every track that follows comes through the same way. No editing, no files, no uploads. This page is about using the extension on music.youtube.com specifically: how playlists behave, how your settings carry from one song to the next, and the one hard limit, which is that it only works on desktop.

If you came here looking to make slowed versions of your own music files, the slowed reverb maker does that and exports MP3. The extension never exports anything. It is for listening. The extension versus web editor page explains the split if you are unsure which you need.

Setting it up on YouTube Music

1. Install Slow & Reverb for YouTube from the Chrome Web Store. It is free.
2. Open music.youtube.com in the same browser. Reload the tab if it was already open.
3. Start a song. Click the extension icon and pick a preset or move the sliders.
4. Leave the tab open and let the queue run.

Version 0.2.1 asks for two permissions, tabs and storage. Tabs lets it know when a YouTube or YouTube Music tab is active so it can attach to the player. Storage saves your settings so they come back next time. The permissions page goes through both in detail and lists what the extension never does.

Why YouTube Music and not just YouTube

The regular YouTube site mixes music with everything else. YouTube Music is a player: album pages, artist radio, your library, a persistent queue at the bottom of the screen. That queue is the key. Once the extension is attached to the player, every song that the queue loads plays through the effect without you reopening the popup. An album becomes a slowed album. A radio station becomes a slowed radio station.

There are a few things that are different from regular YouTube:

• Audio-only tracks. Many songs on YouTube Music have no video, just album art. The extension still works, because it attaches to the media element whether or not there is a picture.
• Video toggle. Songs that have an official video let you switch between song and video. The effect follows the switch.
• Background play. On desktop, YouTube Music keeps playing when you switch to another tab. The effect keeps going too, because the processing happens in the YouTube Music tab itself.
• Gapless albums. Albums that run together without silence stay continuous. The reverb tail of one track carries into the next, which on a concept album sounds exactly right.

Keeping settings across tracks

This is where the storage permission earns its place. Without it, every new track would start dry at normal speed and you would reach for the popup over and over. With it, the extension writes your current speed, reverb, space, bass, tone and width to Chrome's local extension storage, plus any custom presets you create. When the next track loads, the extension reads those values back and applies them before the audio starts.

Three practical consequences:

1. Your settings survive a browser restart. Open YouTube Music tomorrow and the effect is where you left it.
2. Settings are per browser profile, not per account. If you use two Chrome profiles, each has its own.
3. Nothing is synced to a server. The stored values live on your machine. Clearing the extension's data or uninstalling it removes them.

If you want different settings for different kinds of music, save a preset for each. A deep one for late night R&B, a lighter one for daytime pop, a dry one at 1.00x for when you just want YouTube Music to be YouTube Music again. Switching presets takes one click.

Settings by what you are playing

Streaming audio on YouTube Music is already compressed, so the settings below sit a little lighter on reverb than the ones people use for uploads. The genres page on the blog, slowed and reverb settings by genre, has more detail on why each style wants what it wants.

The built-in presets map to these roughly. Haze Chamber is the deep end (0.85x, 54 percent reverb, heavy bass, dark tone, wide stereo); its preset page explains the thinking. Wave Drift is lighter and cleaner. Dry resets everything.

Mixed playlists and the speed problem

One thing you will notice fast on a long mixed playlist: the same speed setting feels different on different songs. A 0.84x setting makes a 150 BPM dance track feel relaxed and makes a 75 BPM ballad feel like it is dragging. The extension applies one setting to everything, so the honest answer is to choose your playlists with the effect in mind. Mid-tempo and up-tempo playlists slow beautifully. Slow ballads usually want 0.92x or higher, or no slowing at all with a little reverb.

If a song comes on that sounds wrong, you have two options. Nudge speed up from the popup for that song, or skip. Changing speed does not reload the track; the change is instant.

Desktop only, and why

The extension runs on desktop Chrome and Chromium browsers (Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi). It does not run on Android or iOS, because mobile Chrome and the YouTube Music apps do not load extensions. That is a platform limit, not a choice.

If you listen on your phone, the route is the web editor, which works in mobile browsers. Load tracks you own, apply the effect, download the MP3s, and put those in your phone's music player. The slowed reverb maker page covers it. It is more work than a live effect, but the result is yours to keep.

What it does not do on YouTube Music

• It does not change what is in your library or alter the files Google serves. Only the audio in your tab is processed.
• It does not download tracks or let you save the slowed version. There is no export, and there is not going to be one in the extension.
• It does not work in the YouTube Music desktop app wrappers or progressive web app installs that run outside the browser extension context.
• It does not change your account's history or recommendations. YouTube Music sees normal playback.
• It cannot process audio cast to a speaker or TV, because that audio is decoded on the other device.

Open the free editor: upload MP3, WAV, AAC, OGG or FLAC, adjust speed, reverb, bass, tone, width and space, then export MP3 or a ZIP of many tracks. Everything runs in your browser.