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Free Audio Cutter

Cut MP3, WAV, M4A or OGG on a waveform you can actually see, with fades, volume and speed. No watermark, no sign-up, and nothing is uploaded.

Drop your audio here

MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, OGG, FLAC — or a video, to cut its soundtrack.

Your audio never leaves this device.

Most audio cutting is not editing in any grand sense. It is removing the thirty seconds of shuffling before a lecture starts, lifting one answer out of an interview, taking a chorus for a ringtone, or dropping a cough out of the middle of a voice note. All of that is a start point, an end point, and a decision about which side to keep.

What makes it fiddly is not the cutting but the finding, which is why the waveform is the main thing on this page rather than a pair of time fields. You can see where the silence ends and the voice begins. Click the picture to move the playhead, drag the handles to the edges of what you want, and press play to hear the selection with the fades and volume you have set — not the original file, but the thing you are about to download.

None of it is uploaded. The audio people cut is disproportionately private — voice memos, medical appointments, interviews, therapy sessions, half-finished songs — and this tool never sees any of it, because the work happens in your browser and the file never leaves the machine it is already on.

How to cut an audio file

  1. 1. Open your audio

    Drop in an MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, OGG or FLAC file — or a video, if you want to cut its soundtrack. It is decoded in your browser and never uploaded.

  2. 2. Find the part you want

    The waveform shows you where the sound is. Click it to move the playhead, drag the handles to set the start and end, and press play to hear just the selection.

  3. 3. Keep it or cut it out

    Keep it makes the selection the whole file. Cut it out deletes the selection and joins the two sides together, which is how you drop an interruption out of the middle of a recording.

  4. 4. Tidy the edges

    A cut that lands mid-waveform leaves an audible click. A fade of a tenth of a second at each end removes it. Normalise if the recording is too quiet.

  5. 5. Choose a format and download

    M4A is small and plays everywhere. WAV is uncompressed and exactly the samples. OGG Opus is the smallest at a given quality. Press Cut & Download and the file is written on your machine.

What it can do

Which format to save as

M4A is the default and the right answer nearly always. It is AAC inside an MP4 container, it sounds better than MP3 at the same bitrate, and it plays on every phone, computer and browser made this century. At 192 kbps it is transparent for ordinary material — speech, podcasts, most music.

WAV is uncompressed: exactly the samples that came out of the cut, with nothing discarded and no second generation of compression. Choose it when the file is going into an editor afterwards, or when you want to be certain nothing has been lost. The cost is size — roughly ten megabytes a minute.

OGG Opus gives the best quality per byte of the three by a clear margin, and it is excellent for speech at very low bitrates. The catch is support: browsers and modern players handle it, but plenty of older hardware and some editing software will not open it.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cut an audio file for free? +

Drop your file above, drag the handles on the waveform to the part you want, and press Cut & Download. It works immediately, with no sign-up, no watermark and no file size limit. The whole thing runs in your browser, so there is no upload to wait for.

Is my audio uploaded anywhere? +

No. The file is decoded and cut entirely on your own device, and nothing is transmitted to any server. That matters more for audio than for most things — the recordings people cut are voice notes, interviews, lectures, therapy sessions and demos, which are exactly the files you would rather not hand to a stranger.

Can I cut out the middle of a recording? +

Yes, that is what Cut it out does. Select the part you do not want — a cough, a phone ringing, a long silence — and the two sides are joined together into one file. The join is sample-accurate, and a short fade at the seam will hide it completely if the cut lands somewhere awkward.

What formats can it open? +

Anything your browser has a decoder for, which in practice means MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, OGG, Opus, FLAC and WebM. Video files work too: drop in an MP4 or MOV and it will cut the audio track, which saves you converting first.

What formats can it save? +

M4A (AAC), WAV and OGG (Opus). M4A is the default because it is small and plays on everything including iPhones. WAV is uncompressed, so it is exactly the samples with nothing thrown away — the right choice if the file is going into an editor afterwards. Opus gives the best quality per byte but fewer players accept it.

Can it save as MP3? +

Not currently. Browsers ship decoders for MP3 but not encoders, so writing one would mean shipping a large encoder library to every visitor. M4A is the better answer anyway: it is the same idea as MP3, sounds better at the same bitrate, and plays anywhere MP3 does. If you specifically need a .mp3 file — some older car stereos and DJ software insist on it — save as WAV here and convert that.

Will cutting reduce the quality? +

Cutting itself does not — it selects samples, it does not change them. What can cost a little is re-encoding at the end, since a compressed file has to be decoded and compressed again. Save as WAV and there is no loss at all. Save as M4A at 192 kbps or above and the difference is not audible on ordinary material. Only a tool that copies the compressed stream directly is lossless while staying compressed, and that requires software outside the browser.

How precise is the cut? +

To the sample. The handles move in hundredths of a second and you can type exact figures, but the underlying operation works on the decoded samples rather than on compressed blocks, so the cut lands exactly where you put it rather than at the nearest frame boundary.

What does normalising do? +

It finds the loudest peak in your cut and scales the whole thing up so that peak just reaches maximum. Because everything is scaled by the same amount, nothing is distorted and the balance between loud and quiet is unchanged — it is a volume knob set as high as it can go without clipping. It is the right fix for a recording that came out too quiet. It will not make a quiet voice stand out against loud background noise; that needs compression, which is a different operation.

Can I make a ringtone with it? +

Yes. Cut the section you want, add a short fade in and fade out so it does not start and stop abruptly, and save as M4A. For an iPhone ringtone the file needs renaming to .m4r after you download it, and it has to be 30 seconds or shorter.

Is there a file size or length limit? +

No imposed limit, because nothing is uploaded. The real limit is memory: decoding turns compressed audio into raw samples, which takes roughly ten megabytes per minute of stereo CD-quality audio. An hour-long recording is fine on a normal computer; several hours may not be, and phones have less room.

Why does changing the speed change the pitch? +

Because speed is applied the way a tape machine applies it — playing the same samples faster raises the pitch, exactly as it did on tape. This is what you want for a chipmunk effect or for speeding up a lecture slightly. Changing speed while holding the pitch steady is a different and much harder operation, and this tool does not attempt it.

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