Trim Audio

Trim audio cuts a piece out of a sound file: you set where it starts and where it ends, and everything outside those two marks is gone. The work happens on your own device. The file is never uploaded, there is no account to create and nothing is charged, however long the recording is and however many times you come back.

The piece you keep is copied out of the original rather than made again, so it returns in the same format and at the same quality: an MP3 stays an MP3 and sounds exactly as it did before. That is also why it is quick - there is nothing to work out, only a stretch of sound to move into a new file. The one thing worth knowing is that a cut lands on the nearest frame boundary inside the file, a few hundredths of a second from the number you typed. You will not hear that, and nothing else about the sound changes.

Cutting a track down is most often the first step towards a ringtone, and the page has a button for the usual length. On Android the file you download is ready to use: put it in the phone's Ringtones folder and pick it in the sound settings. iPhone asks for more. It accepts a ringtone only under the name .m4r, and that file has to be loaded onto the phone from a computer with iTunes, Finder or GarageBand, so the last step cannot be done on the phone itself. When your file is an M4A, this page offers the .m4r name next to the normal download. Ringtones are far from the only use: taking one song out of a long recording, keeping the part of an interview you actually need, or cutting the silence off the front of a voice memo all work the same way.