What does cutting audio involve?
Cutting audio means keeping one section of a recording, defined by where it starts and how long it lasts, and discarding the rest. It is the audio equivalent of trimming a video, and it is the most basic edit you can make to a sound file.
In this tool the kept section is re-encoded as an MP3. That is different from a lossless cut, because the audio is compressed again as it is written. For speech, ringtones and general clips the difference is rarely noticeable, but it is worth knowing if the original was a high-quality file.
Common reasons to cut a clip
People cut audio to make ringtones and alert sounds, to pull a quote out of an interview, to remove silence from the start or end of a voice recording, or to isolate a short sample from a longer file.
It also helps when a service limits upload length or file size. A shorter clip is a smaller file. If you start from a video, you can first pull out the sound with Extract Audio from Video and then cut it here.
If the cut leaves the sound too quiet or too loud, the volume booster can adjust the level afterwards.
How to cut audio with this tool
- Drag an audio file onto the upload area, or click to choose one.
- Set Start (sec), the number of seconds from the beginning where the clip should start. The default is 0.
- Set Duration (sec), how many seconds to keep. The default is 5.
- Click Run. On first use the ffmpeg engine (roughly 30MB) downloads before processing.
- Listen to the result in the player, then click Download.
The values are plain seconds, so a start at 1 minute 15 seconds is entered as 75. All of it runs in your browser through ffmpeg.wasm, and your file is not uploaded.
Tips and limits
There is no waveform or timeline, so find your start time and length in a player first, then type them in. If the cut is slightly off, adjust the numbers and run it again. Your original file is never changed.
The output is always MP3, whatever format you started with. The saved file is named after the original with "-cut" added, and it ends in .mp3.
If the source is long, processing takes longer because the file is loaded into your browser's memory. Very large recordings may fail on devices with limited memory.