Load a track, choose a path around your head, preview it in headphones, export a lossless WAV. It runs entirely in your browser, so your file is never uploaded and the export finishes faster than the song plays. It is free, there is no account, and there is no watermark on the result.
A spiral with compass holds — one of seven starting shapes, and editable from there.
Open the converter and choose a file — MP3, WAV, FLAC or M4A. It is decoded inside the browser tab, so nothing is uploaded and there is no queue to wait in. Pick something you know well: the first time you hear the effect, you want to be able to tell what it is doing to a track you can already picture.
Start with something sparse. A dense, loud master has little room left in it for movement to be audible; a track with space in the arrangement shows the effect far more clearly.
A path is the route the sound takes around you. Tap a starting shape — a smooth orbit is the classic 8D circle and the right first choice. Then set the lap: how many seconds one full circuit takes. This single number does more to the feel of the result than anything else on the page.
Around 8–14 seconds a lap reads as movement. Under about 4 it stops sounding like travel and starts sounding like a tremolo. You can also lock the lap to the track's tempo so a circuit lands on a bar line.
Press preview and listen with headphones on — the effect does not survive speakers. Now drag the waypoints. Pull one closer to the centre and the sound passes nearer on that leg; push one to the outer ring and it recedes, losing its high end as it goes. Add a hold to a point and the sound waits there.
Preview and export are built from the same audio graph, so this is not an approximation of the result — it is the result, played live.
Export renders the whole track offline through your own processor rather than playing it through in real time, which is why a four-minute track takes well under four minutes. The output is peak-normalised and saved as a lossless WAV — no re-encode, no watermark, no length cap.
Posting it somewhere that wants a smaller file? Convert the WAV afterwards. Encoding last rather than first keeps one lossy generation out of the chain.
Most converters give you one control: rotation speed. These are the six worth understanding, with the range each one accepts and what it does to the sound.
| Setting | Range | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Lap length | 2 – 60 s | The tempo of the movement. 8–14 seconds is the sweet spot for a recognisable 8D circle; slower reads as drift, faster as wobble. |
| Distance | 0 – 2.5 | 0 is inside your head, 1 is arm’s length, 2.5 is the far ring. Vary it — a route that stays at one radius throws away three of the four cues that sell the movement. |
| Doppler | 0 – 120 ms | How much the pitch bends as the source approaches and recedes. Subtle amounts add realism; high amounts are an effect in their own right and will detune a sustained melody. |
| Height | −40° – +90° | Below you, through ear level, to overhead. The weakest axis in any HRTF, so use it as seasoning. Best on pads and tails, worst on anything with a strong pitch. |
| Hold | 0 – 10 | How long the sound dwells at a waypoint before moving on. Holds are what turn a circuit into a rhythm rather than a constant sweep. |
| Accent | −12 – +6 dB | A level trim at one waypoint. Use it to stress an arrival out front, or to duck a pass behind the listener so it does not dominate. |
Every control is documented individually, with the gestures that reach it, in the8D converter field manual.
The one mistake that makes everything else pointless. Binaural rendering needs each ear to receive a different signal; speakers let both ears hear both channels and the whole effect collapses. Check on headphones before you conclude something is not working.
A lap under about four seconds stops registering as a sound travelling and starts registering as an amplitude wobble. If it sounds seasick rather than spatial, slow the lap down before you change anything else.
A circle at a fixed radius only uses the direction cue. Letting the route breathe in and out brings loudness, air absorption and Doppler into play as well — which is most of what separates a convincing 8D track from an obvious one.
A heavily limited track has no dynamic room left for distance to be audible, and the effect flattens. An earlier or sparser mix will move far more convincingly.
The mono source, the stereo render and the WAV bytes all exist in memory at once — roughly 42 MB per minute of audio. Past about twelve minutes the page warns you; on a phone, assume rather less. A failed export is nearly always this.
Sum the track to mono, apply a head-related transfer function so it appears to come from a specific direction, then move that direction along a path over time while varying loudness, high-frequency absorption and Doppler pitch with distance. In Azimuth that is four steps: load a file, pick a path, preview in headphones, export a WAV — all in the browser, with nothing uploaded.
None. Azimuth’s converter runs in any modern browser with no install, no account and no plugin. If you would rather work in a DAW, the equivalent is a binaural panner plugin — dearVR, Noise Makers Binauralizer or the free Sennheiser Ambeo Orbit — with the panning position automated across the timeline.
Under two minutes for a first pass. Loading and choosing a path takes about thirty seconds, and the export renders offline faster than the track plays, so a four-minute song exports in well under four minutes. Fine-tuning a custom path is where the time goes, if you want it to.
Eight to fourteen seconds for one full circuit suits most music. Faster than about four seconds and the ear stops interpreting it as travel and starts hearing an amplitude wobble; much slower than twenty and it reads as a slow drift rather than an orbit. Locking the lap to the track’s tempo keeps circuits landing on bar lines.
Yes — the converter works on a phone browser, and headphones are the only requirement. The limit is memory rather than processing: rendering holds the whole track in RAM several times over, so long files are more likely to fail on a phone than on a laptop. Keep it to a few minutes.
Almost always because the path is spending too long far away. Distance deliberately reduces level and rolls off high frequencies — that is what makes it read as distance — so a route sitting near the outer ring will sound dull throughout. Bring the waypoints in towards the reference ring and it will brighten.
The converter is open and free with nothing to sign up for. When you want two of them at once — each on its own path, mixed live — that isthe DJ decks, on the same engine.