How to Cut a Song Online (Free, Nothing Uploaded)

Cutting a song is one of those tasks that used to mean installing sketchy software or uploading your music to a random website. Neither is necessary: your browser can cut audio on its own, and the file never has to leave your computer. Here is the quick version, then the details.

What you need

• The song file (MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC, OGG — whatever you have)
• A browser: the MP3 cutter runs entirely on your device
• About one minute

Step 1: Open the song

Drop the file onto the MP3 cutter page or click to browse it. The waveform appears immediately — no upload progress bar, because there is no upload. This matters more than it sounds: it means the tool works on unreleased tracks, private recordings and anything else you would rather not send to a stranger’s server.

Step 2: Choose what happens to the selection

Drag across the waveform to mark a section. Then pick one of two modes:

• Keep selection — the export contains only the highlighted part. Use this to extract a chorus or a highlight.
• Delete selection — the export contains everything except the highlighted part. Use this to remove a long silence at the start, an announcement, or a bad final chorus.

If dragging feels imprecise, open Precise times and type the start and end seconds directly. The timecode under the waveform shows your position to a hundredth of a second while you drag.

Step 3: Preview, then export

Press play — it plays just your selection. If the cut lands mid-word or mid-beat, nudge the handles a few times; ten seconds of adjusting makes the difference between obvious and invisible. Then click Export:

• WAV is bit-perfect: the kept audio is identical to the source. Use it when quality matters or when you will edit the file again later.
• MP3 320 kbps is transparent for virtually everyone and about a tenth of the size. Use it for sharing and listening.
• MP3 128 kbps is fine for spoken content, wasteful for music.

Two tricks that make cuts sound professional

Cut on the beat. Endings that stop exactly on a downbeat sound intentional; endings that stop between beats sound like mistakes. Zoom in (the + button) and watch where transients land.

Fade the edge. A 0.2–0.5 second fade-out in the Adjust drawer hides an abrupt ending. This is also exactly how to make the cut loop cleanly as a ringtone.

Cutting on a phone

The same cutter works in mobile Safari and Chrome: the waveform accepts touch, and the export button stays pinned to the bottom of the screen. For ringtones, the ringtone maker is the same tool with a 40-second guard rail and iPhone-specific instructions.

Common questions

Is it legal to cut a song? For personal use — ringtones, practice, edits of your own recordings — yes, in most places. Distributing or publishing the cut of someone else’s copyrighted track is a different matter; that is about the sharing, not the cutting.

Why does the site not need an account? Because there is nothing to store. The cut happens in your browser’s memory and the result downloads straight to your disk. See about our local-first approach for how that works.

I need the parts glued back together differently. Cut the sections you need into separate files, then combine them in order with the audio joiner — it can even crossfade between them.