Audio Editor — Cut, Trim & Add Effects to Audio Online

A free online audio editor that runs in your browser

This online audio editor works like a small desktop editor, right in the page. Open an MP3, WAV, OGG, M4A or FLAC file, or record from your microphone, then cut, copy, paste and trim on a zoomable waveform. Drop split markers, insert other files, and polish the sound with gain, normalize, fades, reverse, speed, low-pass and high-pass filters, echo, reverb, a noise gate and a compressor. A spectrogram view and loop playback help you find and fix problems. When you are done, export WAV (16 or 24-bit) or MP3.

It is free, with no account, no watermark and no locked features. It suits voice memos, interviews, podcasts, meeting recordings, rehearsal takes and music clips.

How to cut or trim an audio file online

Open your file and drag across the waveform to select a part. Press ✂ cut (Ctrl+X) to remove it, or ⊡ trim (T) to keep only the selection and delete everything around it. That is the quickest way to shorten a recording or pull out one clip. Scroll the mouse wheel over the waveform to zoom in for exact edit points, press sel to zoom to the selection and 0 to see the whole file again.

Audio effects in plain words

• Gain makes it louder or quieter by a set number of decibels.
• Normalize raises the level so the loudest peak lands on your target, between −12 and 0 dBFS.
• Fade in / fade out ramps the volume smoothly over the selection.
• Reverse plays it backwards. Mute replaces the selection with silence.
• Speed makes it faster or slower. The pitch moves with it, like a tape.
• Low-pass and high-pass filters remove highs or lows.
• Echo adds repeating delays and reverb adds room ambience.
• The noise gate silences quiet passages between words and the compressor evens out loud and soft parts.

With a selection, every effect only changes the selected region: select the noisy pause and gate it, select the quiet sentence and raise its gain. With no selection the effect applies to the whole file. The info bar under the waveform always shows what is selected.

How to remove background noise from a recording

Start with a high-pass filter around 80–120 Hz to cut rumble and microphone handling noise. Then use the noise gate with a threshold just above the hiss level (−50 dB is a good first try) so the pauses become silent. For constant hiss in the high end, a gentle low-pass at 10–14 kHz helps. Loop a short noisy stretch with L while you try settings, and undo if it goes too far.

What the spectrogram shows

Press S or ▦ spectrogram to swap the waveform for a spectrogram. Time runs left to right, low frequencies sit at the bottom and high ones at the top, and brighter means louder. It makes problems visible that are hard to hear: mains hum is a thin horizontal line at 50 or 60 Hz, hiss is a haze across the top, and a phone notification is a sudden bright blip. Select the problem area and treat it with the filters or the gate.

Split a long recording into separate files

Place the cursor and press ◇ split (M) to drop a marker. Markers divide the timeline into regions. Double-click between two markers to select that region, then cut it, process it, or export it with range: selection only as its own file. It is a quick way to turn a podcast session, a rehearsal or a batch of voice memos into separate takes.

Join two audio files

Put the cursor where the second file should go and press ⇓ insert file, or simply drop another file on the page while one is open. It is decoded, resampled to the same sample rate and spliced in at the cursor. Add trims and fades and you can build an intro, interview and outro into one file. Recording from the mic works the same way: with a file open, the new take goes in at the cursor, so you can punch in a correction or add a voice-over.

WAV or MP3?

WAV is lossless: full quality and large files. Use it if you will edit again later or hand the audio on for more production (16-bit for general use, 24-bit for extra headroom). MP3 is compressed and much smaller, which suits sharing, podcasts and phones. 192 kbps is plenty for voice and 320 kbps is the safe choice for music. Every MP3 export adds a little compression loss, so keep a WAV master if you plan more edits.

Why speed also changes the pitch

The speed effect resamples the audio, like speeding up or slowing down a tape. 200% is twice as fast and an octave higher, 50% is half speed and an octave lower. Changing tempo while keeping the pitch needs time-stretching, which adds smearing artefacts, so it is not included. For small changes on speech, around 90–110%, the pitch shift is hard to notice.

Editing on a phone

The editor works with touch: drag to select, tap to place the cursor, and use the zoom buttons instead of the mouse wheel. Effects, recording and export all work on a phone. Fine, sample-level editing is easier with a mouse and keyboard, but trimming a voice memo and saving it as an MP3 is comfortable on a small screen.

How long a file can I edit?

Audio is held in memory as uncompressed samples, roughly 10 MB per minute for each channel at 44.1 kHz, and each undo step keeps a copy. Recordings up to half an hour or so are comfortable on a typical laptop. Very long files can hit memory limits, especially on phones, so if you only need a section, trim it early.

Private: your audio is not uploaded

Files are decoded, edited and encoded with the Web Audio API on your own device. Nothing is sent to a server, and the microphone stream is processed locally. That makes it safe for private voice memos, interviews and unreleased music. The only thing the page downloads is the MP3 encoder, and only the first time you export an MP3.

Can I use the result commercially?

The editor adds no restrictions: what you export is yours. The rights that matter are those of the source audio. Your own recordings are yours to use anywhere; for music or clips made by someone else, their licence applies whatever tool you edit them with.

Keyboard shortcuts

Space play/pause · Esc stop · L loop · R record · S spectrogram · T trim · M marker · F fullscreen · Ctrl+A select all · Ctrl+X / C / V cut, copy, paste · Del or Backspace delete · + / − / 0 zoom in, out, fit · Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y undo and redo. On a Mac, Cmd works in place of Ctrl.

More audio tools

Make a chiptune loop in the 8-bit chiptune studio and trim it here, watch it move in the music visualizer, or play the result in the 90s MP3 player or the Winamp-style player. Musicians can use the metronome and BPM counter, the guitar tuner and the song practice player, and there is a focus audio generator for background sound. See all music tools.