About this Morse code decoder
This site is a free Morse code decoder for real-world recordings: game and ARG clips, videos, songs and radio audio where the Morse sits under music, speech or noise. It runs in your browser, and every result comes with a way to check it against the original sound.
Why this decoder exists
In September 2026 we reviewed the 100 most recent “please translate” posts on r/morse. About 70 of them contained audio or video rather than text, and most of those recordings were not clean tones: the Morse was mixed with music, speech, game sound or static, or it looped with no clear start.
The online translators we compared were built for a single clean tone and warn that background noise must be low. People who try them on real clips report that they fail. This decoder is built for the messy case: you can see the sound, pick out the Morse, and listen while you correct.
In October 2026 we read 2,217 Reddit posts and 10,933 comments about decoding Morse. The most common request was for someone to check a result; the most common complaint was decoders that failed on noisy audio. The rest of this page is our answer to both.
Who builds it
This site is built and maintained by Ellis Claire.
It started with films: Morse messages tapped out or flashed on screen made the code look fun, and this site grew out of wanting to decode them from the actual sound.
We build it around the help requests people actually post, test each release against a fixed set of recordings, and use reported mistakes to improve it.
Found a wrong result, or have a question or correction? Email [email protected].
Last updated: October 24, 2026
How decoding works
- Your browser extracts the sound from the audio or video file. Nothing is uploaded.
- A spectrogram shows the sound over time. Morse appears as a dashed horizontal line: click it to lock its pitch, and select only the passage you need.
- Quick read uses ggmorse, an open-source decoder that measures the timing of the tone. It is fast and works on any device.
- Careful read uses CWformer, an open-source neural network trained only to turn Morse audio into characters. It is downloaded once and then runs on your device.
- You can replay a character’s sound where its timing is known, correct it, and use Compare playback to hear the original next to your corrected text played as Morse.
About the neural network
Careful read is not a chatbot. It does not search the web, guess puzzle answers or rewrite text into nicer sentences; it only maps sound to Morse characters.
It can still be wrong. In a long recording where Morse is only a small part, it can output letters that look like real words but are not in the audio. That is why Quick read stays available for comparison, and weak passages are flagged instead of presented as confirmed.
What we tested, and what we have not
On 22 September 2026 we ran both readers in a browser on 37 synthetic recordings: Morse mixed with white noise, speech or music, with uneven timing and drifting pitch. Quick read decoded 21 of the 37 messages exactly, with about 29% of characters wrong on average. Careful read also decoded 21 of 37 exactly, with about 16% of characters wrong.
Those recordings were generated for testing. They are not real game clips or radio contacts, so these numbers are not a real-world accuracy rate. We also keep eight public radio recordings for checks, but they do not yet have independently verified transcripts, so we do not report an accuracy figure for them. We do not promise any accuracy percentage.
How to check a result yourself
- Listen to the original passage, then use Compare playback. The rhythm of your text played as Morse should match the recording.
- Count the dots and dashes. Two different words rarely share the same pattern, so a quick count catches many wrong answers.
- Characters the decoder could not recognize are shown as “?”, and weak passages carry a warning. Treat them as unconfirmed.
- If it matters, such as a tattoo or a puzzle answer you plan to share, try a second decoder or ask on r/morse with the timestamp.
What we don’t do
- We don’t upload your audio, video or images. They are processed in your browser.
- No account, subscription or paywall.
- We don’t use a chatbot to generate or interpret answers.
- We decode International Morse only. Japanese Wabun and American railroad Morse are not supported.
- Optional analytics and ads load only after you accept them in the cookie settings. Ads are placed outside the decoder controls and are never disguised as buttons or setup steps.