Trim Audio

The cut is only as good as the times you type, so it pays to find them carefully. Play the file in any player that shows the current position: the music app on your phone, a desktop media player or a browser tab. Pause at the moment the wanted part begins and note the time, then do the same for the end. Most players show minutes and seconds; for finer control, scrub back and forth a little and note decimals such as 1:15.5.

Speech needs a little margin. Words start slightly before they are clearly audible, and the last syllable trails off after it seems to end, so begin a fraction of a second earlier and finish a fraction later than you think. Music is easier at the start of a bar or after a drum hit; cutting halfway through a held note sounds abrupt unless you fade it.

If the times do not land quite right the first time, run the trim again with adjusted values. Each run works from the file you added, not from the previous result, so nothing is lost by trying twice.

The same two time fields cover very different jobs. Here are the ones that come up most, with the settings that fit each. Each one is quick once you know the times, and all of them work on a phone as well as on a computer.

Selected range decides what the two times mean. With Keep it, the default, the result contains only what lies between Start at and End at: one song from a live set, the answer you want from an interview, the opening of a track for a video intro. Everything outside the range is dropped.

With Remove it, the result contains everything except that range. Use it for a mistake in the middle of a recording, a long pause, a section with private details, or a phone notification that went off during a talk. The part before and the part after are joined into a single file, so it plays on as if the removed section had never been there.

To take out several separate sections, run the tool more than once, working from the end of the file towards the beginning. Removing a later section first keeps the times of the earlier sections unchanged, so the times you noted while listening stay correct. For a recording that needs a lot of editing, a desktop sound editor with a waveform view is the better tool; this one is built for clean, quick cuts with exact times.

Sound is a wave, and a cut that lands while the wave is far from zero produces an instant jump that you hear as a click or pop. On speech it can be faint; on music, especially bass-heavy music, it is obvious. A fade lowers the volume smoothly to silence, or raises it from silence, so the jump never happens.

Fade in and Fade out accept 0 to 10 seconds in half-second steps. Zero means a hard cut. Half a second to one second is enough to remove clicks without being noticed. Two or three seconds at the end of a music excerpt or a ringtone sounds deliberate, like the end of a radio edit. Long fade ins work for background music under a voice, where the music should slowly appear.

When Selected range is set to Remove it, the two parts are joined where the section was taken out. If the join clicks, run the trim again with a short fade; listen to the join point specifically, since that is where a problem would show.

Output format keeps the format of the source by default, so an MP3 stays MP3 and a WAV stays WAV. Change it when the cut has a new purpose: M4R for an iPhone ringtone, MP3 for any phone, player or web form, WAV or FLAC when you will keep editing, M4A for Apple apps and OGG for games and open-source software. To convert without cutting, the Audio Converter page has more targets and settings.

Bitrate is used when the file has to be encoded again, which happens when the format changes or a fade is applied to a lossy format. It offers 128, 192, 256 and 320 kbps, with 192 kbps as the default; that keeps music clean, and 128 kbps is plenty for speech. WAV and FLAC are lossless and ignore this setting.

If the sound you want is part of a video rather than an audio file, the Video to Audio tool takes a start and end time too and saves only that section of the soundtrack. And for clips of the video itself, Trim Video works the same way as this tool.

Ringtones are the most common reason to trim a song, and they have a few quirks. Pick a short, recognizable part, such as the hook of the chorus, since a ringtone usually plays only for a few seconds before the call is answered. Set Fade out to two or three seconds so it loops gently, and a short Fade in if the part starts loudly.

For an iPhone, choose M4R as the output. The file then needs to be added to the phone from a computer: through Finder on a Mac or iTunes on Windows, after which it appears in Settings > Sounds & Haptics. Android phones accept MP3 files as ringtones directly; copy the file to the phone and pick it in the sound settings, which vary a little between manufacturers.

Keep in mind that a song you bought or streamed may come with license terms. Making a ringtone for your own phone is a different matter from sharing a cut of someone else's music.