How to use PulSound
PulSound turns an audio file into a finished video without an account, an upload, or an editor. This page walks through the whole thing once, then covers the parts people ask about.
The short version
- Open the studio (the front page).
- Pick a template from the grid on the right.
- Choose your audio file.
- Set the aspect ratio for wherever the video is going.
- Press Preview to see it move.
- Press Export video and wait for the track to play through.
The file downloads when the recording finishes. That is the entire process.
Nothing you load is uploaded
Your track is read by your own browser and analysed on your own machine. It never travels to our servers, so an unreleased song stays as private on PulSound as it is in the folder it came from. The same applies to your cover art and background image.
This has one practical consequence worth knowing: the recording happens in real time. A three-minute song takes three minutes to export, because the video is being produced as the audio plays. There is no queue and no waiting for a server, but there is also no way to make it faster than the song itself.
Choosing an aspect ratio
| Ratio | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| 16:9 | YouTube, and anywhere a normal widescreen video is expected |
| 9:16 | YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok |
| 1:1 | Square posts in the Instagram feed |
| 4:5 | Portrait posts in the Instagram feed — taller, so it fills more of the screen |
Export the same track more than once if you need it in several places. Your settings stay put between exports, so switching ratio and pressing Export again is a two-click job.
Resolution and file size
1080p is the right answer for almost everything. 720p is perfectly acceptable on social platforms and finishes faster. 360p and 480p exist for test exports — use them while you are still deciding on a template, then switch up for the real thing.
4K makes sense only if your visuals have fine detail and you are uploading to YouTube. It is demanding: your computer has to draw eight million pixels thirty times a second while also recording them, and a slower laptop will drop frames, which shows up as stuttering in the finished file. If you see that happen, drop to 1080p or switch from 60 fps to 30.
MP4 or WebM
Choose MP4 unless you have a specific reason not to. Instagram, TikTok and Facebook require it. YouTube accepts both.
Safari records MP4 directly. Chrome, Edge and Firefox record WebM, and PulSound converts it to MP4 afterwards — in your browser, again with nothing uploaded. That conversion roughly doubles the total wait. If it fails for any reason, you still get the WebM file rather than nothing, and that file will upload to YouTube without complaint.
Cover art and background images
Cover art appears in templates built around it: Circle Spectrum, Vinyl, Halo, Orbit and Pulse. Square images work best, since anything else is cropped to a square.
A background image is scaled to fill the frame and cropped from the centre, so choose a picture whose subject is in the middle. Two settings under Fine tuning matter here: Darken background, which you raise until text and visuals are clearly readable, and Background reacts to music, which makes the image zoom slightly with volume and nudge on each beat. That second one is what stops a still photo from looking pasted behind the visuals.
Getting a result that looks designed
- Pull your accent colour out of your cover art. One matching colour does more than any other single setting.
- Turn sensitivity down for loud, heavily compressed masters, where everything moves at once and nothing reads. Turn it up for sparse or quiet tracks.
- For vertical video, move the text away from the bottom edge — apps put captions and buttons there.
- Fewer bars usually looks better on a phone than more. Detail disappears at small sizes.
- Glow works in small amounts. Past about a third of the slider it turns everything to mush, especially at lower resolutions.
Release pages
Create an account and every track you upload gets its own page at pulsound.com/your-name/track-title, with your cover art, a player and buttons through to Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. It is a single link you can put in a bio, a post, or a message to a playlist curator. Your artist page collects all of them in one place.
If something goes wrong
- The export stutters. Lower the resolution or the frame rate, and close other tabs. Recording competes with everything else your machine is doing.
- Switching tabs during export ruins the video. Browsers slow down drawing in background tabs. Leave the tab visible while it records.
- Nothing moves in the preview. Check that the track is actually playing and that your system volume is not muted — the visuals follow the audio output.
- The file came out as WebM when you asked for MP4. The conversion could not run. The file is still fine for YouTube; for Instagram or TikTok, try a different browser.