ihateaudio

Audio Trimmer

Drag the handles, hear it, keep what you want.

Drop an audio file here

or paste one from your clipboard

MP3 · WAV · M4A · AAC · OGG · FLAC and moreYour file stays on your device. Always.

How to use it

  1. Drop your audio file onto the page, or click to browse for it. Nothing is uploaded. The file is read directly by your browser.
  2. Drag the two handles on the waveform to select the part you want to keep. You can also type exact timecodes below the waveform.
  3. Press play to hear just the selection, and adjust until it sounds right. Loop it if you want to check the boundaries.
  4. Choose whether to keep the selection or cut it out, pick an output format, and click Download.

Cutting audio without uploading it

Every other free audio cutter works the same way: you hand your file to a server, it does the work, and you download the result. That means waiting through two transfers, trusting someone else with a recording that might be a private voice note or unreleased music, and usually hitting a size cap that exists to keep their bandwidth bill down.

None of that is necessary. Browsers have had a complete audio engine built in for over a decade. The same one that powers web games and video calls. This tool decodes your file with it, draws the waveform from the actual samples, and writes the trimmed result back out. Your file is read from disk into the tab's memory and never travels anywhere. You can verify that by opening your browser's network tab while you use it, or by disconnecting from the internet entirely: the page keeps working.

Choosing where to cut

Cuts sound cleanest at a zero crossing, a point where the waveform passes through the centre line. Cutting mid-wave leaves an abrupt jump in the signal, which your ear hears as a click. If you hear one at either end of your cut, turn on Fade the edges: a 20-millisecond fade is far too short to be audible as a fade, but it is more than long enough to eliminate the click.

For speech, leave a little air on each side rather than cutting tight against the first and last word. Around 100 milliseconds of room tone before someone starts speaking sounds natural; a hard cut straight into a consonant sounds abrupt, even when the edit itself is technically clean.

Keeping the quality you started with

MP3 is a lossy format, so decoding and re-encoding one loses a small amount of quality. A generation loss, like photocopying a photocopy. One pass at 192 kbps or higher is inaudible to almost everyone, and a single trim is one pass. It only becomes a real problem if you run the same file through many lossy edits in sequence.

If you plan to keep editing, export as WAV or FLAC between steps. Both are lossless, so you can trim, normalize, add fades and convert without compounding any loss, then encode to MP3 once at the very end. WAV is instant here; FLAC is about half the size for identical quality.

Questions

Is there a file size limit?
There is no limit we impose, because the file is never sent anywhere. The real limit is your device's memory: roughly 40 minutes of audio on a phone, and several hours on a desktop. If a file is too large, the tool says so before it tries, rather than crashing the tab.
Does trimming an MP3 reduce its quality?
Slightly, if you export back to MP3, because the audio is decoded and re-encoded. At 192 kbps or above the difference is inaudible in practice. If you want to avoid it entirely, export as WAV or FLAC. Both are lossless from this point onward.
Can I cut a section out of the middle?
Yes. Select the part you want gone and switch the mode to "Remove selection". Everything outside the selection is joined back together, with a very short crossfade at the join so you do not hear a click.
How precise can I be?
The timecode fields accept hundredths of a second, and the arrow keys nudge a selection handle by 0.05 seconds at a time (hold Shift for one-second jumps). That is far finer than the ear can detect at a cut point.
Why is this faster than other online audio cutters?
Most of them upload your file to a server, process it there, and send it back. So you wait for two transfers plus a queue. This one does the work in your browser, so the only limit is how fast your own machine is. For a typical song, trimming takes well under a second.
What formats can I open?
Anything your browser can decode, which covers MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, OGG, Opus, FLAC and WebM. Formats browsers cannot read natively (WMA, AIFF, AMR) should go through the audio converter first, which loads a fuller decoder on demand.