Free Online Audio Cutter for Songs and Ringtones

What happens to the file when you cut it

An audio cutter saves the part of a recording between a start point and an end point as a new file, and leaves the original untouched. The quality of the new file depends on how it is written, and that depends on the format you start from and on the fades you choose.

Each time an MP3 is decoded and encoded again, the encoder throws away a little more detail. Cutting at frame boundaries copies the original audio data across untouched, so a ringtone or a clip made this way sounds the same as the song it came from.

Lossless MP3 cuts and frame boundaries

An MP3 file is a chain of short blocks called frames. Each frame holds 1,152 samples of audio, which lasts about 26 milliseconds at the CD sample rate of 44.1 kHz and 24 milliseconds at 48 kHz. A frame cannot be split without decoding it, so the cutter moves each cut point to the nearest frame edge.

In practice the cut lands within about 26 milliseconds of where the handle sits. That is shorter than a single syllable of speech and much shorter than one beat of music, so the difference is rarely audible. If a cut clips the start of a word or a drum hit, move the start handle slightly earlier.

A fade changes the audio inside the frames, so a cut with a fade has to be decoded and saved again. The cutter writes it as a WAV to avoid a second round of MP3 compression. A 16-bit stereo WAV at 44.1 kHz takes about 10 MB per minute, roughly ten times the size of a 128 kbps MP3, which is no problem for a 30-second ringtone.

Cutting on the beat

A clip that starts and ends on a downbeat sounds intentional, and one that starts half a beat late sounds like a mistake. If you know the tempo of the song, you can work out where each bar falls and type the times in. In 4/4 time a bar lasts 240 divided by the tempo in BPM (beats per minute) seconds.

Pop choruses are often 8 or 16 bars long, which at 120 BPM is 16 or 32 seconds. The BPM finder gives the tempo of any song file to one decimal place.

To place the start, find the first loud drum hit of the section on the waveform, drag the handle just before it and preview. Then add the bar length to the start time and type that as the end.

Choosing a fade length

A cut in the middle of a sound stops the waveform abruptly, and the speaker hears that jump as a click. A fade brings the level up from silence at the start and down to silence at the end, which removes the click and softens the edit.

Fade in and fade out are set separately. A ringtone often works best with a 1-second fade in, so it starts cleanly mid-song, and a 3-second fade out so it ends gently.

Cutting speech, podcasts and voice memos

Speech is easier to cut than music, because it has natural pauses. Put the start handle in the silence just before the first word and the end handle in the silence after the last one, then preview to check nothing is clipped.

Leave about half a second of quiet at each end. A clip that starts on the first consonant sounds rushed, and a short pause gives a video or podcast editor room to place it.

If the recording has background noise, a hard cut makes the noise start and stop suddenly. A 1-second fade at each end smooths that over. For noise across the whole recording, the guide to Audacity noise reduction shows how to remove it before you cut.

Common jobs and the settings that suit them

Making a ringtone from a song

Pick the part of the song people recognize, usually the start of the chorus or a distinctive intro. Keep it short, start it on a beat and preview it a few times to check how it sounds when it begins without warning.

iPhone ringtones in GarageBand

iPhone ringtones use their own format, M4R, and this cutter does not save it. Apple’s GarageBand app for iPhone turns an audio file into a ringtone, and ringtones can be up to 30 seconds long, so cut your clip to 30 seconds or less first.

1. Save the cut to the Files app or iCloud Drive on your iPhone.
2. In GarageBand, start a new audio recording, open the Tracks view and tap the Loops button.
3. Tap Files, then Browse items from the Files app, and drag your clip to the start of a track.
4. Go to My Songs, select the song, tap Share and choose Ringtone.
5. Name it and tap Export, then choose Standard Ringtone, Standard Text Tone or Assign to contact.

If the clip runs over 30 seconds, GarageBand offers to shorten it automatically. Songs from Apple Music are copy-protected and cannot become ringtones.

Android ringtones from an MP3

Android plays MP3 ringtones directly, so an MP3 cut without fades is ready to use. On a Google Pixel, connect the phone to a computer with a USB cable and copy the file into the Ringtones folder. Then open Settings, tap Sound & vibration, then Ringtone, pick your clip and tap Save.

Samsung and other makers place the same option under slightly different names in Settings. A different ringtone for one person is set in that person’s contact card in the Contacts app.

When a cut does not sound right

• A click at the start or end. The cut lands in the middle of a sound. Add a 1-second fade, or move the handle to a quiet spot.
• The first syllable or hit is missing. An MP3 cut moves to the nearest frame, up to about 26 milliseconds away. Move the start handle slightly earlier.
• The download is a WAV, and you wanted an MP3. Fades and non-MP3 sources always produce a WAV. Turn both fades off and start from an MP3 to keep the format.
• The file will not open. Check the format and the limits of 500 MB and 20 minutes. Copy-protected downloads from streaming apps cannot be decoded.

Joining clips and editing inside a recording

Removing a cough from the middle of a recording, joining two songs or splitting an hour-long set into tracks needs an audio editor with a timeline.

Audacity, the free audio editor, does all of these. The guide to trimming and cutting audio in Audacity covers deleting a section and joining clips, and the guide to splitting a recording into tracks shows how to export each part as its own file in one go.