How to trim silence, remove clicks and cut out unwanted parts
Most recordings start a few seconds too early and end a few seconds too late, and many have a part in the middle that shouldn't be there. All three take under a minute to fix.
Trim the start and the end
On the waveform, the silence before someone starts talking looks like a thin flat line. To keep only the useful part:
- Drag from just before the first sound to just after the last one.
- Press Space to listen to the selection. Use “Last 3 s” to check the ending.
- Click “Keep only the selection”. Everything outside it is removed, and you can undo if you overdid it.
Leave a short breath, around a quarter of a second, before the first word. Starting exactly on the first syllable sounds abrupt in most players.
Delete a section from the middle
A cough, an interruption, a false start or a phone ringing:
- Play the recording and press I just before the unwanted part and O just after it. The selection is created while you listen.
- Play the selection to confirm it contains only what you want gone.
- Click “Delete the selection”. The audio before and after is joined.
- Play across the join (start a couple of seconds before it) to check it sounds natural.
If the join sounds sudden, undo and move both edges into nearby pauses. Cuts that go from silence to silence are almost always invisible to the listener.
Why cuts sometimes click
A sound wave moves above and below zero thousands of times per second. If a cut lands while the wave is far from zero, the speaker jumps instantly from one position to another, and you hear that jump as a click or pop.
The cure is a fade so short you can't hear it as a fade. In the save panel, set Fade in and Fade out to 0.05 s. The first and last 50 milliseconds ramp smoothly from and to silence, and the click disappears. The joins created by “Delete the selection” are not faded, so place those cuts in silent gaps where the wave is already near zero.
Musical fades
For songs, background music and ambient sound, longer fades sound intentional rather than abrupt. One second suits most clips; two or three seconds suits an ending that would otherwise stop dead. Avoid long fades on speech, as they make the first and last words quieter.
A quick clean-up routine
- Delete obvious problems in the middle first: coughs, interruptions, long hesitations.
- Trim the beginning and end with “Keep only the selection”.
- Set 0.05 s fades and export at the recommended quality.
- Listen to the first and last ten seconds of the saved file in your normal player.