Morse Code Translator With Audio

About the Morse Code Translator With Audio

Type text to turn it into International Morse code, or paste dots and dashes to read them as text — the page works out which you gave it. Every letter, figure, punctuation mark and service signal of the ITU standard is supported, including prosigns such as <SK> and <SOS>.

Press Play to hear the code at the speed you choose (5–60 words per minute), with optional Farnsworth spacing — characters at full speed with longer gaps between them, the way most people learn. The same timing can flash a light on screen and vibrate a phone. Download the sound as a WAV file, made on your device, and practise sending with the tap key: press and hold for dahs, tap for dits, and the decoder writes what you keyed.

Common uses

• Learning Morse for amateur radio, scouting or sailing, with Farnsworth spacing and a practice key.
• Writing a message in Morse for a puzzle, escape room, tattoo, jewellery engraving or greeting card.
• Checking what a sequence of dots and dashes says, even with uneven spacing.
• Making a Morse audio clip (WAV) for a video, ringtone or class.

The International Morse code

The characters follow Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1 (10/2009), International Morse code: the letters A–Z with the accented É, the figures 0–9, the punctuation marks . , : ? ' - / ( ) " = + and @, and the service signals understood ...-., error ........, invitation to transmit -.-, wait .-..., end of work ...-.- and starting signal -.-.- (ITU-R M.1677-1). Signs without a signal are sent as the recommendation says: × as X, % as 0/0 (2% → 2-0/0), ‰ as 0/00, and a fraction such as ½ with the fraction bar, joined to a whole number by a hyphen (1¾ → 1-3/4, 4½‰ → 4-1/2-0/00).

Write a prosign in angle brackets to send its letters without gaps: <AR> (end of message, same as +), <BT> (break, same as =), <SK>, <KN>, <SOS>. The common amateur-radio extensions ! ; & _ and $ are also understood. Other accented letters lose their accent (Ö → O, ß → SS) unless you tick Accented letters, which uses the extension codes such as Ä .-.-, Ö ---., Ü ..-- and Ñ --.-- — these are not part of the ITU standard and differ between countries.

Speed: WPM, PARIS and Farnsworth spacing

ITU-R M.1677-1 fixes the proportions: a dash is three dots, the gap inside a character one dot, between characters three dots and between words seven dots. Speed is counted with the standard word PARIS, which is exactly 50 dot-lengths long including its word gap, so one dot lasts 1.2 ÷ WPM seconds. At 20 WPM a dot is 60 ms, a dash 180 ms, a letter gap 180 ms and a word gap 420 ms.

With Farnsworth spacing, characters are sent at the character speed c but extra space is added so that the text comes out at the slower overall speed s. The page uses the ARRL standard (J. Bloom, KE3Z, QEX): the extra time per word is ta = (60c − 37.2s) ÷ (s·c) seconds, of which 3/19 goes into each of the four letter gaps and 7/19 into the word gap of PARIS. For example, characters at 18 WPM with an overall 5 WPM make each letter gap 1.57 s and each word gap 3.66 s, and PARIS still takes exactly 12 seconds.

Practising with the tap key

Press and hold the key: a short press is a dit, a press about three times as long a dah. The decoder starts at a gentle 12 words per minute and then follows your own rhythm, so it adapts as you speed up or slow down. Pause about 2½ dot-lengths to end a character and about 5 to end a word. If letters run together, leave longer gaps; if a character splits in two, keep the gaps inside it shorter. The sidetone you hear uses the tone and volume set under Play.

Sound, light and vibration

The sound is generated live with the Web Audio API, with 5 ms soft edges on each tone to avoid clicks. The light is a small lamp on the page, kept far smaller than the screen area that the accessibility guideline WCAG 2.3.1 treats as a flashing risk; still, leave it off if flashing lights bother you. Vibration uses the phone’s vibration motor where the browser allows it (Android browsers generally do; Safari does not), and the WAV file is a 16 kHz, 16-bit mono file made on your device with the same timing, tone and soft edges as the playback (at a fixed level, whatever the volume slider says).

Limitations

• Only the tap key decodes live; the page does not listen to Morse through the microphone.
• Characters outside the ITU set and the common extensions (emoji, symbols such as €, other scripts) have no Morse code and are listed as skipped.
• WAV downloads are limited to 10 minutes of audio.
• Vibration depends on the browser and device, and phones in silent or battery-saver mode may not vibrate.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.