Breaking the boundaries of the medium, from words to music, Heardle is currently enjoying the limelight. However, here’s the catch: While Heardle’s website is accessible from everywhere, it turns out that not all locations are allowed to access the daily sound clips necessary to play the game.
We think no one should be left out of enjoying Heardle. So, in this article, we will provide you with a fairly simple method you can employ to play Heardle and get in on the music guessing frenzy that’s taking over the internet, no matter where you are.
What is the Heardle game?
On its journey to capturing your attention and that of everyone around you, Wordle has laid the path for several spin-offs. Dordle, Quordle, Nerdle, Swordle, Absurdle, you name it and it probably has a Worlde spin-off.
But Heardle stands out. Heardle is one of these delightful spin-offs that has taken a life of its own. Making the jump from words to sound, Heardle has captured the attention of music fans around the world, fans who take pride in their depth of music knowledge.
Following the footsteps of Wordle, Heardle also gives you 6 tries to guess the song of the day correctly. The hints, however, come in the form of sound clips from the song. The first clip is a 1-second intro from the song and as more guesses are entered, Heardle increases the length of this clip. An additional 1-second is added after the 1st guess, then 2 more seconds after the 2nd guess, and so on.
The good news is that you don’t need to have encyclopedic music knowledge to join in on the fun. In fact, Heardle makes it easy by providing you with a search bar that brings up songs from its database based on your guess. You don’t need to know the exact name of a song or the artist, Heardle has that covered.
To make your experience even more smooth, Heardle’s website claims that the songs are “plucked from a list of the most-streamed songs in the past decade”.
Related: How to set up a VPN on Android
Why is Heardle blocked for you?
When you go to Heardle and everything loads up perfectly, you’ll see a board with 6 boxes where your guesses are shown, and below it will be a media player that is meant to play a clip of the song you’re about to guess. To help you with the first guess, only 1 second of the track will be playable while subsequent guesses will reveal up to 16 seconds of the song clip.
However, the same may not be the case if Heardle isn’t able to load up properly on your web browser and if you find yourself in such a situation, you’ll see the following error which reads “today’s track is unavailable on SoundCloud in your location”.
As to why you’re getting this error, it has probably to do with your current location, which may be preventing you from listening to the sample clip from today’s soundtrack. That’s because Heardle uses SoundCloud as a source to provide audio tracks that are used as clues inside the game. As Heardle’s website mentions, Heardle is “prepared with SoundCloud”, an integration that allows Heardle to upload, play and engage with tracks on SoundCloud.
While Heardle may not have been blocked in your region or by your network provider, there’s a chance that Soundcloud or a part of its music library is. Although Soundcloud is one of the most popular music streaming services out there, you may still be unable to access its service or some of its content.
If you’re unable to load anything that plays on Soundcloud, it means the region you’re in is geo-blocked by Soundcloud. This kind of restriction is fairly common in other streaming platforms, like Spotify, Hotstar, Youtube TV, etc.
However, in the case of Heardle, the reason for an audio track not loading up might have to do with copyright or licensing restrictions of the content that needs to be played on Soundcloud. This may be happening because the artist or the publishing company may not have to right to stream the specific content worldwide, which may be why it’s not available in your region.
Related: Absurdle Wordle Spinoff Explained
How to unblock Heardle
If you were excited about playing Heardle, there is light at the end of the tunnel. It is possible to unblock Heardle on your phone and engage in the daily music guessing frenzy irrespective of your location. This can be done by bypassing the geo-block used by SoundCloud.
As most readers are already aware, the easiest method of bypassing a geo-block is by using a VPN to redirect your IP address to a remote server. If you choose this remote server at a place where SoundCloud has no restrictions, your job is done and you can play Heardle and access the sound clips without facing any errors.
On phone
For this guide, we will use the Urban Free VPN app. It’s a free, easy-to-set-up VPN service that can bypass geo-block just as well as any other paid VPN service available on App Store or Google Play Store.
You can also download Urban VPN from the following links:
Once you’ve downloaded the app, open the Urban VPN app and follow the on-screen instructions to set it up. Once that’s done, tap on the down arrow icon adjacent to “Auto Location” to select a desired remote server.
To give Urban VPN access to add VPN configurations, tap on Allow.
Wait for Urban VPN to add configurations for its VPN service. In the list of locations, select the one that suits you. For example, selecting ‘Australia’ from this list worked in our favor when playing Heardle.
Your VPN connection will now initialize and you’ll see the timer start counting when your connection is ready to be used.
Now, you can test whether Heardle loads up properly on your phone by opening Google Chrome or any other browser of your choice and then going to Heardle. You can now play the sound clip by clicking on the Play icon.
On PC
Unblocking Heardle on your PC is quite similar to doing the same on your phone. However, instead of using a VPN app to bypass the geo-block, we will do the same using a VPN extension on Google Chrome. Needless to say, you can install the same extension on other web browsers that allow you to do so. The extension we will use is “Urban Free VPN proxy Unblocker”. Unlike its mobile app, the extension has almost all the proxy server locations in the free version itself.
Open Google Chrome from your PC and open this extension on a tab. You can also use any other web browser that offers this add-on or similar extensions. On the page that opens, click on Add to Chrome.
Once the extension is installed, click on the Extensions icon at the top right corner of the browser window. In the Extension’s overflow menu, click on the extension you just installed and follow the on-screen instructions for the initial setup.
Once set up, click on Auto Server to be able to select your server location.
From the list of options, select United States.
You’re now connected to a VPN.
Now that VPN is enabled in your browser, go to Heardle and check if the sound clip for today’s puzzle loads up by clicking on the Play icon at the bottom.
Additional list of VPNs you can use to unblock Heardle
While Urban VPN is a good VPN service to be used for free and on all devices, you may want smelting that offers faster speeds and is more reliable. Hence, we prepared a list of similar but better, and hence most likely paid, VPN services for your Mac systems, Windows PC, and phone.
1: ProtonVPN: Private, Secure VPN
Download: iOS | Android | PC | Mac
2: Turbo VPN Private Browser
Download: iOS | Android | PC | Mac
3: NordVPN: VPN Fast & Secure
Download: iOS | Android | PC | Mac
4: Norton Secure VPN & Proxy VPN
Download: iOS | Android | PC | Mac
Is there any other way you can unblock Heardle?
Heardle isn’t the only game that’s blocked for some users. Previously, users were unable to play daily puzzles on both Wordle and Numberle but unlike on Heardle, the solution involved connecting to another wireless network or getting around the network restrictions of your organization (school or company).
The issue that people are facing with Heardle is different from the one found on Wordle or Numberle. Since Heardle relies on Soundcloud’s library of music to give song clips as clues, connecting to a different network doesn’t unblock Heardle the same way it would for Wordle and Numberle. As we explained above, you may not be able to load a song clip because the song’s artist doesn’t have the proper licenses to play it in your region and it doesn’t have anything to do with your network restricting access to Heardle.
As one of the solutions for unblocking Wordle and Numberle involved saving today’s puzzle in .HTML format, we tried using the same technique for unlocking Heardle. In our attempts to get it to work, we also tried connecting to VPN, opening the Heardle website with the song clip loaded, and then saving the page. However, when we tried to re-open the saved webpage, the page loaded on the screen but failed to play the media.
All in all, if you’re facing the “track is unavailable” issue when loading Heardle, the only way to solve it is to connect to a VPN service to get it up and running.
Heardle Unlimited: All You Need To Know
If you like playing Heardle and guessing the names of artists from short clips of their music, you may want more from the game. But is there a way to play unlimited games on Heardle? We’ll set things straight in this section.
Can you play more than one Heardle a day?
Heardle, just like Wordle and most of its spin-offs, is a daily puzzle challenge. What this means is that you can only play one game of Heardle on its website on any day and once you’ve played it, you will have to wait till it resets, i.e., at midnight local time every day.
If you’ve played today’s Heardle, you will have to wait till the clock strikes 12 AM in your region to get the next daily puzzle, regardless of whether or not you guessed the song correctly.
April 28, 2022: You can play old Heardle Games, BTW. Check out our post on Heardle Archive at the link below.
Related: Heardle Archive: How to Play Old Heardle Games
How to play old Heardle puzzles
Unlike Wordle which lets users access its old archive to play past puzzles, Heardle doesn’t give users a way to access their old library. Instead, the only way to play an old Heardle game is by changing the system date on your phone or computer manually and then accessing the Heardle site.
We found this technique to be hit or miss because in our testing we were only able to load yesterday’s puzzle and couldn’t access older puzzles even if we change the date to something beyond a day before.
Related: Heardle Archive: How to Play Old Heardle Games
How to get more guesses when playing Heardle
Heardle can be fun to play but the likelihood of a right guess is very much dependent on how extensively you know your music. Since you can only win the game if you guess the song correctly in 6 attempts, the game can be a little hard if you aren’t into all music genres. If you’re struggling to guess today’s soundtrack and you don’t want to waste any more of your attempts, the easiest way to get more guesses is to play Heardle in another web browser or in incognito mode.
If you want your Heardle streak to be intact, we’ll suggest you open Heardle in an incognito window and make your guesses. Even if you fail in all 6 of your attempts or skip them, you will be able to see the correct answer and will be able to play the full 30-second clip of the song.
This should help you make a good guess and protect your streak on Heardle.
Heardle Alternatives: 6 games like Heardle you can play
Heardle is still a relatively new Wordle spin-off and currently, there aren’t any other games that offer the same gameplay as Heardle. The only puzzle game that comes any close to Heardle is BTS Heardle, which is a version of the game based solely on the Grammy-nominated South Korean group BTS. The game is created by the same person who was also behind BTS Wordle and puts BTS fans to test their song knowledge about the group.
When you first load the game, you’ll get 7 attempts to figure out which BTS song is today’s answer. Your first clue will be a lyric from the song from where you can make your guess or skip it. Subsequent attempts will get you up to 30 seconds of the song’s snippet after which you can make one last attempt at guessing it.
Inspired by the official Heardle game, there are now a handful of song-guessing games that you can play at the moment. We’ve listed them below:
FAQs
Heardle is a relatively new wrinkle when it comes to Wordle spin-offs and faqs are a great way of getting familiar with anything new and fresh. So, let’s get started.
What happens if I deny location in a web browser and then try to play the Heardle game?
Unfortunately, denying location in a web browser on your PC or phone does not unblock Heardle. In fact, you will encounter the same error in Heardle as you did before blocking location access to your web browser.
Will SoundCloud know when you’re using a VPN?
No. SoundCloud cannot detect whether you’re using a VPN or not.
Why is Heardle still blocked after I used a VPN?
If you’re having issues even while using a VPN, likely, the VPN service you’re using is not reliable or the location chosen by you in the VPN is also geo-blocked.
I’m still getting the ‘this track is not available in your location message. How should I proceed?
In this case, you can either change the location to one that is not geo-blocked, or you can try another, more trusted VPN service. Feel free to refer to the list of VPN services mentioned in this guide itself.
How do hints in Heardle work
The hints in Heardle come in the form of a sound clip. You begin with a 1-second intro of today’s song. However, with subsequent guesses, the length of this clip keeps getting incremented. For example, after the first guess the clip length is 2 seconds, then after the 2nd guess an additional 2-seconds get added to it, thus making it a 4-second clip, and so on.
What is the total length of the hint given by Heardle?
Right before your final guess (6th), the length of the clip is the largest, i.e. 16 seconds to be precise.
Does heardle have old songs?
Heardle’s website claims that it takes songs from “a list of the most-streamed songs in the past decade”. So, if an old song happens to be on this list, it could appear as the Heardle of the day. However, the list likely includes only recent songs.
We hope this article helped you unblock Heardle at your location in a few easy steps. If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to us using the comments section below.
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Fuck you