Audio Cutter & Trimmer

An audio cutter lets you keep just the part of a recording you need and throw the rest away. Our free audio cutter and trimmer runs in your browser: open an MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG or AAC file, see its waveform, drag the start and end handles or type exact times, play the selection to check it, add a fade in or fade out, and save the clip as MP3 or WAV. Use it to trim silence from a voice memo, cut a podcast clip for social media, make a ringtone or prepare an on-hold message. Your audio is never uploaded.

How to use the Audio cutter

1. 1 Open your audio fileDrop one file onto the tool or choose it from your device. MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG, Opus, AAC and WebM work in current browsers, and so does the sound track of most MP4 videos.
2. 2 Choose the section to keepDrag on the waveform to move the nearest handle, use the plus and minus buttons for 0.1 second steps, or type exact times such as 1:23.5 into the start and end boxes.
3. 3 Play the selectionPress Play selection to hear exactly what will be saved, including any fades. Adjust the handles until the cut points sound clean.
4. 4 Add fades if you want themA short fade in and fade out avoids abrupt starts and clicks. Half a second to two seconds suits most clips.
5. 5 Save as MP3 or WAVPick the format, bitrate and channels, press Cut and save, then preview or download the trimmed file.

What you can do with an audio cutter

Trimming is the most common audio edit there is, and for a lot of everyday jobs it is the only one you need. Small businesses, teachers, podcasters and anyone who records on a phone use it for tasks such as:

• Removing the fumbling and silence at the start and end of a voice memo or interview.
• Cutting a 30 to 60 second highlight from a podcast episode to share on social media.
• Making a ringtone or notification sound from a track you own.
• Preparing an on-hold message, voicemail greeting or radio-style advert of an exact length.
• Splitting a long recording by saving several sections one after another.
• Trimming a music bed to fit the length of a video or presentation.

Reading the waveform

The waveform is a picture of the sound over time. Tall sections are loud, thin sections are quiet, and a flat line in the middle is silence. Speech looks like a series of separate bursts with small gaps between words and larger gaps between sentences, which makes it easy to spot where to cut. Music tends to look more continuous, with drum hits showing as regular spikes.

The part between the two handles is highlighted; anything outside them will be removed. For the cleanest result, place your cut points in a quiet gap rather than in the middle of a word or note. Zoomed out, a long file packs a lot of sound into each pixel, so for very precise edits type the time directly, use the 0.1 second buttons, or select the waveform and use the arrow keys: arrows move the start, Shift with the arrows moves the end, and holding Alt makes the step 0.01 seconds.

Fades and avoiding clicks

Cutting a recording in the middle of a sound can create a small click or an unnaturally sudden start. A fade in gradually raises the volume from silence at the start of the clip, and a fade out lowers it to silence at the end. Even a short fade of half a second makes most cuts sound smoother.

For speech, 0.5 to 1 second is usually enough and keeps the first word clear. For music, 2 to 5 seconds at the end gives a natural finish when you have cut a track before its real ending. If the fades together are longer than the selection they overlap, so the clip never reaches full volume; the tool will warn you if that happens. The preview player applies the same fades as the saved file, so what you hear is what you get.

MP3 or WAV for your trimmed clip

Save as MP3 when the clip is going to be shared, uploaded or played on phones and websites. 128 kbps suits speech, 192 kbps is a good default for music, and 256 or 320 kbps keeps the most detail. Save as WAV when the clip is going into editing software, a phone system or any workflow that asks for uncompressed audio.

Trimming an MP3 and saving it as MP3 again means encoding it a second time, which loses a small amount of quality. At 192 kbps or higher this is very rarely audible, but if you plan to edit the clip further, save a WAV copy as your working file. Choosing mono halves the size of a WAV and suits voice recordings; if the original is already mono, the output stays mono.

Making ringtones and on-hold messages

Ringtones work best between about 20 and 30 seconds long, with a quick fade in so they do not start abruptly. Android phones accept MP3 files directly: copy the trimmed file to the phone and choose it in the sound settings. iPhones need ringtones in the M4R format, added through Finder on a Mac, iTunes on Windows or GarageBand on the phone itself, so use this tool to cut the section and then import the MP3 into one of those apps.

Business phone systems often have specific requirements for greetings and hold music, typically WAV files in mono, sometimes at a particular sample rate or maximum length. Check your provider's instructions, trim the recording to length here, save it as mono WAV and convert the sample rate if your provider asks for one, for example with our audio converter. Remember that hold music needs a licence unless you own the rights or use music cleared for that purpose.

Splitting a long recording into several clips

The tool keeps one continuous section at a time, but the file stays loaded after you save, so splitting a long recording is quick. Set the handles around the first part, save it, then move the handles to the next part and save again. Each download is named after the original file, so rename the clips as you go, for example interview-part-1 and interview-part-2, to keep them in order.

This works well for turning a recorded workshop into separate topics, pulling several quotes from one interview, or cutting a long voice memo into individual tasks. Write down the start and end times as you listen, then type them straight into the boxes rather than dragging, which is faster and more accurate. If you need to remove a section from the middle and join the remaining parts together seamlessly, save both parts as WAV and combine them in a free editor such as Audacity.

Private, browser-based editing

The trimmer decodes your file with the browser's own audio engine, draws the waveform on your screen and encodes the clip on your device. Nothing is sent to a server, which keeps interviews, voicemails, meetings and unreleased music private and means there is no upload to wait for.

Because the whole file is decoded into memory, very long recordings need plenty of free memory. Files of an hour or two are fine on most computers; phones and tablets are happier with shorter recordings. If a file will not open, the format or codec may not be supported by your browser, so try another browser or convert the file to WAV or MP3 first.

Examples you can copy

Social media audiogram      30-60 s, MP3 192 kbps, 0.5 s fades
Ringtone                    20-30 s, MP3 192 kbps, 1 s fade in
Voicemail greeting          10-20 s, WAV mono (check provider)
Podcast trailer             30-90 s, MP3 128-192 kbps, 2 s fade out
Music bed for a video       match video length, WAV stereo

83.5       83.5 seconds
1:23.5     1 minute 23.5 seconds
1:02:03    1 hour 2 minutes 3 seconds

ffmpeg -i talk.mp3 -ss 60 -to 90 -af "afade=t=out:st=28:d=2" -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 192k clip.mp3

Common mistakes to avoid

Frequently asked questions