Audio tools
Convert formats, trim clips and shrink files without an upload.
Audio files are big, which is exactly why processing them in the browser is worth doing: a podcast episode or a voice recording can be tens or hundreds of megabytes, and uploading that twice — once up, once back down — is usually slower than just doing the work locally. These tools use the Web Audio APIs your browser already ships to decode, cut, join, re-encode and normalise sound without a round trip.
Tools in this category
16About these tools
Lossy, lossless and why converting twice hurts
MP3, AAC and OGG are lossy: they permanently discard detail to save space. WAV and FLAC keep everything, FLAC just packs it more efficiently. Converting lossless to lossy is a one-way door, and converting from one lossy format to another applies the loss twice. If you plan to keep editing, work from the highest-quality source you have and export to a lossy format only at the very end.
Bitrate is the dial that matters
For speech, 96-128 kbps mono is transparent enough that almost nobody can tell, and it makes a podcast episode small enough to distribute comfortably. For music, 192-256 kbps stereo is where most listeners stop hearing artefacts on normal equipment. Going higher mostly buys file size. Halving the bitrate roughly halves the file, which is a far bigger lever than any other setting.
Trimming, joining and levels
Cutting silence off the front and back, joining takes into one continuous track, and evening out volume so a quiet passage is not inaudible against a loud one are the three edits nearly every recording needs. Doing them before the final encode is important: each re-encode of a lossy file costs a little quality, so the fewer passes the better.