How do I know where to cut?

Play the file in whatever you normally use and read the times off its counter. Both boxes accept exactly what a player displays — 2:15 works, and so does 135.

Why is there a fade on my cut?

To stop a click. A cut through the middle of a waveform leaves an instant step from silence to a moving signal, and a step is a click. The fade is twenty milliseconds, which is a fiftieth of a second. Turn it off if you are cutting on an exact beat and want a hard edge.

Can I cut a piece out of the middle instead?

Not in one pass. Trim the part before it, trim the part after it, then put the two back together with the Audio Joiner. The joiner can also crossfade the seam if the cut is somewhere obvious.

Does trimming reduce the quality?

The cut itself does nothing to the samples it keeps. Encoding the result as MP3 compresses it again, which costs a little each time; choosing WAV avoids that entirely at the price of a much larger file.

Trim Audio

Cut a clip out of a recording, by start and end time.

Everything runs inside your browser. Your files never leave your device.

Drop your file here

.mp3, .wav, .m4a, .aac, .ogg, .oga, .opus, .flac, .webm, .weba · they stay on this device

Ask about Trim Audio

Questions about what this tool does, which option to pick, or what it can and cannot handle.

This is the one part of the site that uses a server. The question you type here is sent to an AI provider to be answered — your files and whatever you put in the tool above are not, and the assistant cannot see them. Answers are generated and can be wrong; the tool itself is not guessing.

About the Trim Audio

Most recordings need their ends taken off. The interview starts with forty seconds of somebody finding the record button, the voice note has a lorry going past at the front, the song has a fade you want to lose. Cutting that away is the single most common thing anyone does to a sound file, and it should not require installing an editor.

Type a start time, type an end time, and what lies between them comes back as its own file. Times can be written as plain seconds or as minutes and seconds — 90 and 1:30 mean the same thing — because that is how people read them off a player.

Every cut is faded by twenty milliseconds at each end unless you turn that off. This is not a stylistic flourish. A waveform is a wiggling line, and a cut almost never lands where the line happens to be at zero; the jump from silence straight to mid-wiggle is heard as a click at the join. Twenty milliseconds is short enough that nobody perceives a fade and long enough that the click disappears.

The decoding is done by the browser itself, which means the formats it accepts are the formats it can play: MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG and usually FLAC. The trimming is arithmetic over the raw samples — copying a range out of an array — so nothing is re-rendered, and nothing beyond the encoding at the end is lost.

That last point is worth being precise about. Saving as WAV loses nothing at all. Saving as MP3 re-encodes, and re-encoding an MP3 that was already compressed costs a little quality, as it always does. For speech at a sensible bitrate this is inaudible; for music you are keeping, save the WAV.

Nothing is uploaded. A recording of a meeting, a medical consultation or a private conversation stays on your machine, which is where a recording of a private conversation belongs.

How to use it

1Drop in the recording.
2Type the start time and the end time. Leave either empty to run from the beginning or to the end.
3Choose MP3 for sending to someone, WAV if the clip is going into an editor next.
4Trim, then download.

Questions

How do I know where to cut?: Play the file in whatever you normally use and read the times off its counter. Both boxes accept exactly what a player displays — 2:15 works, and so does 135.
Why is there a fade on my cut?: To stop a click. A cut through the middle of a waveform leaves an instant step from silence to a moving signal, and a step is a click. The fade is twenty milliseconds, which is a fiftieth of a second. Turn it off if you are cutting on an exact beat and want a hard edge.
Can I cut a piece out of the middle instead?: Not in one pass. Trim the part before it, trim the part after it, then put the two back together with the Audio Joiner. The joiner can also crossfade the seam if the cut is somewhere obvious.
Does trimming reduce the quality?: The cut itself does nothing to the samples it keeps. Encoding the result as MP3 compresses it again, which costs a little each time; choosing WAV avoids that entirely at the price of a much larger file.