Cut audio

What cutting audio is for

Trimming a track is handy to grab just the chorus of a song, isolate a line from an interview, make a ringtone, or remove silence and useless parts at the start and end of a recording.

Why the download is WAV

WAV is a lossless format readable everywhere. If you need a lighter MP3, you can convert it afterwards: WAV is the best starting point because it doesn't add further quality loss.

Where to cut, so the cut is not heard

The right point is not where the word ends, but where the sound is already close to silence. Cutting while a sound is still ringing leaves a sharp step in the waveform, and the ear hears it as a dry click: it is the commonest flaw of a hurried edit.

In speech the best place is inside the pause between two sentences, but not right against the word: a tenth of a second of breath before and after makes the cut invisible and the sentence natural. In music, instead, the cut belongs on the beat, that is at the start of a bar, because that is where the ear expects a change.

A fade is nearly always the answer

Even when cutting in the right place, a fade of a few milliseconds at the start and the end removes any residual click: it is the same correction editing software applies by default, often without saying so. It is not heard as an effect, because it is too short to be perceived.

For a ringtone or a clip that loops continuously the opposite is needed: the end has to join back onto the start, so the cut must fall on a whole musical length and the fades must stay extremely short, or the join is heard on every pass.

Why WAV, and when something else is better

A WAV holds the samples as they are, uncompressed: it is the right format to start from for any further work, because it adds no loss on top of whatever the source file already had. Every pass through a compressed format, instead, recompresses from scratch and takes away a little quality, even when the file is not modified.

The cost is size: roughly ten megabytes a minute in stereo at CD quality, against the barely one megabyte of an MP3. For archiving or for the next step it is ideal; to send by email or through a chat it is worth converting, once only and at the end.

The two things forgotten before downloading

Volume: a piece taken from a quietly recorded track sounds much lower than one taken from a modern one, and in a collection of clips the difference is glaring. It is worth comparing it with the others before calling it finished.

And copyright: trimming the chorus of a song for personal use is one thing, publishing it or using it under a video is another, and the automatic recognition systems of platforms detect even a few seconds. A short excerpt is not automatically free: brevity is not, in itself, a legal exemption.

Nearby tools

To join several tracks there is Merge audio, to change format Audio converter and for speed Change audio speed. To record from scratch Voice recorder, and for the audio inside a clip Extract audio from video.