Trim Audio
âšī¸ How it works:
- Upload your audio file
- Drag on the waveform to select the part to keep
- Preview, then download the trimmed clip
Cut a Song or Any Audio File Down to the Part You Want
Upload the file and you see it drawn as a waveform — a picture of where the loud and quiet parts are, which makes finding the section you want far easier than guessing at timestamps. Drag the highlighted region to set the start and end, or type exact times if you already know them. Play the selection back before committing, then download. No sign-up and no watermarks.
How to Trim an Audio File
- Click the upload area above or drag and drop your audio file (up to 10 MB).
- Drag the edges of the highlighted region on the waveform — or enter exact start and end times — to choose the part to keep.
- Press play to hear just that selection.
- Trim and download.
Features
- Visual waveform editor – see the audio and drag a region to select your cut
- In-browser preview – hear the selection before trimming, with nothing to download first
- Precise timing – fine-tune the start and end down to the hundredth of a second
- Wide format support – MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC, M4A and WMA
When You Might Need This
- Pulling the chorus or one verse out of a song
- Cutting the dead air, throat-clearing or false start off the front of a recording
- Getting one quote out of a long interview
- Shortening a track to fit a video, a slide or a time limit
- Making a short clip for a post, a story or a message
- Taking a sample out of a longer piece of music
- Trimming a voice note down to the part that actually matters
- Cutting an over-long file under an upload limit somewhere else
Frequently Asked Questions
Upload it, then drag the left and right edges of the highlighted region on the waveform to mark where your section starts and ends. The waveform makes this much easier than it sounds — a chorus, a drop or a gap between verses is usually visible as a change in the shape. Press play to check, then trim. Everything inside the region is kept and everything outside it is discarded.
In two steps, because each trim keeps one continuous region rather than deleting one. Trim the file once to keep everything before the part you want gone, then trim your original again to keep everything after it. That leaves you with two clips, which Join Audio will stitch back together into a single file with the unwanted section missing. Removing the start or the end is simpler — that is just one trim.
Yes. Dragging on the waveform is quickest for finding roughly the right place, but there are start and end fields you can type into as well, accurate to a hundredth of a second. The usual approach is to drag until it is close, play it, then nudge the numbers until the cut lands exactly where you want it.
Cut in a quiet moment rather than mid-note or mid-word — on the waveform, that is where the shape narrows. A cut that lands in the middle of a sustained sound produces an audible click or a sense of something being chopped off. If the section you need genuinely starts and ends in loud material, Fade Audio will put a short fade on each end, which hides the join entirely.
Very slightly, for compressed formats. Cutting an MP3 means decoding it and encoding the result again, and each encode of a lossy format costs a little detail. In practice one pass is inaudible on a normal listen. If you are going to trim the same file several times, work from the original each time rather than trimming an already-trimmed clip, so the losses do not stack up. WAV and FLAC are lossless, so they are unaffected either way.
You can upload MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC, M4A and WMA. Upload a WMA and you will get a WAV back, since WMA can be read but not written. Need something different afterwards? Convert Audio will change it.
You can, but there is a better route. Ringtone Maker does the same cut and then handles the parts this page does not — the length limit phones expect, the fade, and the .m4r format an iPhone needs. Come here when you just want a shorter audio file; go there when the result is going on a phone.
One file up to 10 MB, which is roughly ten minutes of a typical MP3, about four minutes at a high bitrate, or only a minute or so of uncompressed WAV. If your file is over the limit, Compress Audio will bring it down first. The tool is free, with no sign-up and no watermark.
Related Audio Tools
- Change Speed – speed up or slow down audio
- Join Audio – combine several clips into one file
- Adjust Volume – make audio louder or quieter
- Fade Audio – add fade-in and fade-out
- Convert Audio – change the audio format