How to Watch & Analyze an osu! Replay (.osr)

Every play you set is recorded as a replay - a small .osr file that stores your exact cursor movement and key presses. Watching your own replays is one of the most underused ways to improve, because a replay shows you what actually happened, not what you thought happened. This guide covers how to find, export and read them.

Where replays live

• Local replays save automatically in your osu! folder under Data/r/ as .osr files.
• You can export any recent play - right-click it on the results screen or in your local scores and choose export.
• Online, you can download the replay of most scores that have one from the website.
• Each .osr is tied to one specific play on one specific map.

Watch it back in your browser

You do not need to open osu! to watch a replay. Drop any .osr into the Replay Analyzer and it plays back in your browser - the cursor, circles and sliders animate in sync, with skins, hitsounds and a live combo, accuracy and unstable rate bar.

What a replay actually tells you

• Your unstable rate - how consistent your tapping really was, the single best consistency metric.
• Early-versus-late bias - whether your timing leans one way, which usually means an offset problem, not a skill one.
• Cursor path and aim - where your movement was smooth and where it snapped or overshot.
• The exact moment you choked - replays show whether a miss was a read, a tap, or a movement error.

Once you can read a replay, you stop guessing at what to practise. See the unstable rate guide for how to turn hit-error into a training plan.