Two channels, one file
Everything happens in this page. The file never leaves your machine, the key is never sent anywhere, and nothing is stored when you close it.
This is the only key that will ever appear on this site. It opens a demo and nothing else — fifteen seconds, made to be taken apart rather than listened to. Locked, you get a pulse and a drone: something, and something waiting. Unlocked, the line that answers it arrives and the two play as one figure.
A real key is never published, never posted and never here. It is said to somebody, by somebody, and that is the whole distribution. A key you could have read off a website would open a record for everyone at once, which is not a record anyone was given.
people tiger talent decade provide find pair enact topic exile later admit tribe jealous hand fly arch video local photo velvet roast option tortoise
Load it, then press Unlock — the key is filled in for you. Try a wrong word first if you want to see it refused.
Two vessels standing in the dark.
The left one is the open song. Load any file and it fills with gold — that channel plays for anybody, with no key and no permission.
The right one is the sealed channel. If the file carries one, the vessel appears cold and outlined: present, visible, and empty. That is the honest picture of the thing. You can see that something is there. You cannot hear it.
With the right key it fills from the bottom upward in vermilion, and both channels sound together. A wrong key does not partially open it or degrade gracefully. It is refused.
This page fetches nothing from anywhere else. The sealed channel is compressed with the Opus audio codec, an open format your browser already knows how to decode, so there is no decoder to download and no third party involved in opening a record.
A key moves by being said — not by link, not by message, but by one person telling another. So the place a key is most exposed is a room, and rooms are not private.
A key is twenty-four words, and it is not meant to be carried in your head — it goes on a card, and the card is what you look after. Twenty-four fits one, read out at a size you can manage in a badly lit room, which is the only length test that matters here.
Download the key card
template ▸ — two pages at 85 × 55 mm, front and back, ruled to write a key on by
hand. The typeset version is brand/key-card.html in the repository, if you
would rather print the words than write them.
A key is not meant to be remembered. Nobody can hold twenty-four random words in their head, and nothing here asks anyone to. A key is written down, read out, and guarded. That it cannot be memorised is the design and not a cost of it — a key small enough to remember is a key small enough to guess. What a keyholder looks after is the paper.
You may therefore pad it with nonsense words, and this page will weed them out: any word that is not one of the 2048 wordlist words is discarded, and the checksum confirms what is left. Nothing has to be agreed beforehand and there is no second secret to remember. The padding cannot be improvised freely, though — the wordlist is made of short common English words, so ordinary speech collides with it constantly. Let the tool write the padded version for you.
This is not concealment, and it would be dishonest to sell it as any. The rule is written down in the source below, so anybody listening properly strips the padding exactly as you do. What it raises is the cost of being overheard carelessly — a half-caught sentence, a bystander, a recording nobody examines. That is worth something and it is not protection.
This page is the whole player. Nothing is minified and nothing is hidden, so the quickest reading is your browser's view-source — the modules it imports are served from /lib/ and are plain, short files.
- player.html — this page, decryption and playback included
- website/lib/ — the format as the browser runs it: the FLAC block, the seal, the bundle, the key
- carrier/ — the studio side, which packs a record and mints its key
Opening a record needs nothing installed, so there is nothing to download here. The format is written out in how a record is opened and at greater length in carrier/README.md. A standard FLAC metadata block, AES-256-GCM, a bundle of typed entries. Any language with an AES library can open a record given its key, and this player has no privileged part in it.