Loop a section of a YouTube video
Paste the link, drag two handles around the part you want, and it repeats — that's it. Free, in your browser, no signup, and you can slow the loop down (0.25×–2×, pitch unchanged) while you're at it.
▶ Try it live — no signup opens a video in the player, ready to loop
How it works
- Paste a YouTube link. Any video that allows embedding plays here, through YouTube's own player.
- Drag two handles. Mark the start and end of the section on the timeline — the edges land to a fraction of a second, and a loop can be as short as one second. The loop repeats until you stop it.
- Optionally, slow it down. Speed steps from 0.25× to 2× with the pitch preserved, so a slowed loop still sounds like the recording, just slower.
Keyboard shortcuts if you're at a desk: space to pause, arrows to nudge, number keys to jump. On a tablet or phone, everything is drag and tap.
Not just for musicians
A section loop is a general-purpose tool, and people use this one for all of it: musicians drilling a solo, dancers running one 8-count of a practice video, language learners replaying a sentence until the sounds separate, athletes and coaches re-watching one movement in a match or technique video. If the thing you need to absorb lives in twelve seconds of a longer video, looping those twelve seconds beats scrubbing back forty times.
The difference: your loop is still there tomorrow
YouTube already has a loop button — the ⋮ menu's "Loop" checkbox — and it's worth being clear about what it doesn't do. It repeats the whole video, not a section; there's no way to mark just the part you need, and it resets the moment you close the tab. Third-party loopers usually fix the first problem and leave the second exactly as broken: close the tab and the timestamps are gone. Fine for a one-off. Quietly maddening for anything you come back to, because every session starts with re-finding the spot and re-setting the speed.
Stairway2Fast keeps the record. Every video remembers its loops — name up to 100 of them ("solo bars 3–4", "dance break", "dialogue at 2:10") — and each one reopens with one tap, at the speed you left off. And if you're using loops to practise something, the time logs itself against the video and the section, building a speed stairway of how long you spent at each pace. After a couple of weeks you can see the climb — the section you started at 0.6× and finally broke 0.9× on. Name five loops and Review starts putting them back in front of you on a rotation, so an old one doesn't quietly go stale while you're focused on something new. Streaks, daily goals, per-video history — all recorded from what you actually did, not what you remembered to write down.
One shortcut: some videos frame their own loops
If a lesson or cover's description already lists timestamps — "0:00 Intro", "1:05 Verse 2", "2:40 Solo" — Stairway2Fast can read that list the moment you add the video and offer each stamped section as a loop to import, one checkbox apiece, all ticked by default. Accept the ones you want and they land in your named-loops list already framed and titled, with nothing dragged by hand. It only appears when the creator actually wrote timestamps that way — most descriptions don't — so most adds still start with you framing the section yourself, same as always.
Free vs Pro, honestly
Looping, slow-down, named loops, Review, and all the practice tracking are free, with no account. Uploading your own recordings (lessons, rehearsals, your own playing) and looping them the same way is free too, but it does need a free account — a guest can't upload, and signing up costs nothing; uploads then stay on the device you added them on. Pro is £4.99 / €5.99 / $6 a month, or £47 / €57 / $58 a year, and it adds cloud sync so your uploads follow you too, two deeper insight views into your speed climb over time, and splitting an uploaded song into its separate instrument tracks.
FAQ
How precise can the loop be?
The edges are draggable and nudgeable down to a fraction of a second, and the shortest loop allowed is one second — so "the second half of bar 12" or "one spoken sentence" is a realistic target, not an approximation.
Does slowing the loop change the pitch?
No. Playback uses pitch-preserving time-stretch, so an A stays an A at 0.5× — no chipmunk-in-reverse effect.
Do I need an account?
No. Loop as a guest and every section you frame, every speed, every minute of history stays in that browser. Sign up whenever you want it following you to another device — the free account carries it all over automatically.
Is this allowed by YouTube?
Yes. Looping and slowing happen entirely through YouTube's public, documented player API, inside YouTube's own embedded player — the same interface any site embedding a video is meant to use. Nothing gets downloaded, ripped, or rehosted.
Can I loop any YouTube video?
Any video that allows embedding — nearly all do. If a channel has disabled embeds, YouTube blocks playback outside youtube.com; no looper can change that.
Can I save more than one loop per video?
Yes — up to a hundred named loops per video, which comfortably covers a long lesson or a full routine. Each one keeps its own name and its own remembered speed, so the video becomes a menu you tap through rather than a timeline you re-scrub every time.
Stop scrubbing. Paste the link, frame the section, and let it repeat — and find it still waiting for you tomorrow.