Audio cutter and trimmer

Seeing the sound

The waveform shows loudness over time: tall peaks are loud, flat stretches are quiet. It makes cutting much easier than guessing by time, because you can see where a word starts, where a song's chorus begins, or where silence falls between tracks. Zoom in to place an edge precisely, and play from any point to check what you hear.

Marking clips

Drag across the waveform to mark a clip, then drag its edges to adjust it or the clip itself to move it. You can mark several clips in one file, for example every answer in an interview or three songs from a long recording; each is listed with its start, end and length, and can be played or deleted on its own. Every marked clip is exported.

• Cut at quiet moments. An edge in the middle of a sound is heard as a click; starting a clip in the low part of the waveform just before a word avoids it.
• Leave a little room before the first word and after the last, so speech does not sound clipped.
• Play the clip before exporting, then nudge the edges if needed.

Fades

A short fade at each end makes a cut sound smooth instead of abrupt. The defaults, 0.2 seconds in and 0.5 seconds out, suit speech and most clips. For music, longer fades of 1 to 3 seconds sound natural, especially at the end; for a ringtone or an alert that must start at full volume, set the fade in to 0.

One file per clip, or one file for all

With Join clips into one file off, each clip becomes its own file, numbered in order, and they download together as a ZIP. Switch it on to join the clips one after another into a single file, which is the quick way to remove the parts you do not want from the middle of a recording: mark everything you want to keep, and join.

Format and quality

• MP3 plays everywhere. 192 kbps, the default, suits music; 128 kbps is plenty for speech.
• M4A holds AAC audio, a little better than MP3 at the same bitrate, and plays on every phone and computer.
• WAV is uncompressed and exact, for further editing.
• FLAC is lossless like WAV at about half the size, for archiving music.

For a quick cut from a video without the waveform, video to MP3 takes a start and end time; to change the format of whole files, use the audio converter.

If something goes wrong

• There is a click at the start or end. The edge cuts through a sound. Move it into a quieter spot or lengthen the fade.
• The waveform is flat. The file is very quiet or silent. Check that it plays; a very quiet recording can be raised afterwards in an audio editor.
• Nothing is exported. No clip is marked. Drag across the waveform first.