Audio Trimmer

How to trim an audio file

1. Add your recording. Drop a voice memo, podcast or any audio file into the box. It is read in your browser - nothing is uploaded.
2. Trim the silent ends. Press Trim silent ends to cut the quiet bit before the first word and after the last one.
3. Clean up the middle. Press Shorten long pauses, or select a mistake and press Cut out the selection. Every cut shows in red and can be undone.
4. Save it. Keep Same as file to save it in its own format, or pick MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC, OGG or Opus, and press Save.

Recorded in a noisy room? Set Silence below to -40 or -35 dB so the background hum counts as silence.

Trimmer or cutter - which one do I need?

Both tools share the same waveform editor, but they are made for different jobs.

• Audio Trimmer (this page) - you want to keep almost everything and tidy it up. Silent ends, long pauses, coughs and false starts go; the file keeps its format.
• MP3 Cutter - you want one part out of a longer file, such as a ringtone, a chorus or a quote. It has iPhone and Android ringtone presets and can save several parts at once.

How the silence detection works

The trimmer measures the loudness of every 20 milliseconds of your recording.

Anything quieter than the Silence below level counts as silence. -45 dB suits most phone and laptop recordings; pick -50 or -60 dB for studio-quiet files and -40 or -35 dB when there is hum or traffic in the background.

Shorten long pauses keeps 0.4 seconds of every pause longer than your limit, so speech still breathes naturally - it just stops dragging. A 30 minute interview often loses two or three minutes this way.

Same format in, same format out

Only the finished, trimmed audio is ever sent to our server, and it is deleted right after encoding. Want a different format for the whole library? WAV to MP3 and FLAC to MP3 convert many files at once.

Tips for cleaner recordings

• Normalize under Volume lifts a quiet voice memo to a healthy level without clipping.
• Mono under Channels halves the size of spoken word without any loss you can hear.
• Zoom in before cutting out a word, and listen to the Result to check the join - cuts are blended with a 10 ms crossfade, so there are no clicks.
• Several takes? Trim each one here, then put them together in the Audio Joiner.

Frequently Asked Questions