Cut and trim MP3 audio files online. Extract segments with precise start time and duration for ringtones and clips.
Process files in seconds with our optimized servers
Frame-accurate cuts with intuitive timeline controls
Segments re-encode at high quality; joining multiple clips is lossless
.mp3 audio files. Batch cutting is supported — each file gets its own cut points.12.5) or HH:MM:SS.sss (e.g. 00:01:42.300). Everything before this point is discarded.HH:MM:SS.sss. The output runs from your start time for exactly this duration; everything after is dropped..mp3 is processed on our servers and offered for download — no sign-up, no watermark, uploaded only to xconvert’s own servers, auto-deleted after a few hours.Cutting MP3 extracts a chosen segment of an audio file by start time and duration. MP3 (formally MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer III, ISO/IEC 11172-3 and 13818-3) remains the most universally supported audio format — every modern phone, browser, car stereo, and DAW can play it — which makes it the safest container for short clips you intend to share or re-use.
.mp3 directly as a ringtone or notification sound, with no length cap; 20–30 seconds is the practical sweet spot. Drop the cut file into /Ringtones on internal storage..m4r (AAC in an MPEG-4 container), and Apple says they can be up to 30 seconds long. Cut your MP3 to 30 seconds or less first, then run MP3 to M4R to get a .m4r file ready for iTunes/Finder sync.| Property | MP3 | M4A (AAC) | WAV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Codec | MPEG-1/2 Layer III | AAC-LC / HE-AAC | PCM (uncompressed) |
| Compression | Lossy | Lossy (more efficient) | Lossless / none |
| Typical size (3 min) | 3–4 MB at 192 kbps | 2–3 MB at 192 kbps | 30–32 MB at 44.1 kHz/16-bit |
| Sample rates | 8–48 kHz | 8–96 kHz | up to 192 kHz |
| Max channels | 2 (stereo) | up to 48 (5.1, 7.1) | up to 65,535 |
| iPhone ringtone | No (convert to .m4r) |
Yes (rename to .m4r) |
No |
| Android ringtone | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | Universal playback | Apple ecosystem, smaller files | Editing masters |
| Target | Format | Recommended length | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone ringtone | .m4r (AAC) |
up to 30 s | Apple's documented limit; GarageBand shortens longer exports |
| iPhone text/alert tone | .m4r (AAC) |
up to 30 s | GarageBand exports text tones with the same 30 s limit |
| Android ringtone | .mp3 |
20–30 s | No hard cap; long files just loop oddly |
| Android notification | .mp3 or .ogg |
1–5 s | Keep short; plays in the status bar |
| Smartwatch alert | .mp3 |
1–3 s | Wear OS / watchOS treat anything longer as music |
Cutting here decodes the MP3 to PCM, slices at your exact timestamps, and re-encodes at close to the source bitrate — a sample-accurate cut with one generation of lossy re-encoding, which is the nature of the format. That single pass is undetectable at 192 kbps or higher; if you're chaining edits or working from a low-bitrate source, prefer WAV cutting and convert to MP3 only at the end.
Not as an MP3 — iOS reads ringtones as .m4r (AAC in an MPEG-4 container), and Apple says they can be up to 30 seconds long. The reliable path is: cut your MP3 to ≤ 30 seconds here, run it through MP3 to M4R, then drag the resulting .m4r onto your iPhone in Finder (or add it with iTunes on Windows). Android, by contrast, accepts the .mp3 you produce here as-is.
Not here — XConvert's cutter always decodes and re-encodes, trading one inaudible generation for sample accuracy. Desktop tools like mp3DirectCut operate at frame boundaries instead: they find the nearest MP3 frame to your requested start/end (about 38 frames per second) and rewrite the file headers without ever decoding the audio. The trade-off is that such cuts snap to roughly 26 ms granularity rather than landing on an exact sample. For ringtones, podcast clips, and voice memos that's invisible; for music edits where the cut must hit a precise downbeat you may notice the offset.
The cut itself is sample-accurate — "cut at 12.000 s" starts at 12.000 s. The usual cause is encoder delay: MP3 encoders insert a short priming/padding block at the start of any file (~26 ms for LAME, longer for some others), so a clip cut from 00:00:00.000 may show a few extra milliseconds of silence at the head. Setting your start to 00:00:00.050 usually clears it.
This page extracts a single contiguous segment defined by start + duration. To keep, say, the intro and the chorus from the middle while dropping everything else, cut each segment separately, then merge them with an audio joiner. For multi-cut scenarios on a single file, audio-cutter handles general audio formats and is the better starting point.
Cutting changes the duration — same bitrate, fewer seconds, smaller file. Compressing changes the bitrate or sample rate — same duration, fewer kilobits per second, smaller file at the cost of audio fidelity. They're complementary: you'd cut a 60-minute lecture down to a 5-minute clip, then compress MP3 to drop it from 192 kbps to 96 kbps if you need to fit an email attachment limit.
Most modern MP3 cutters preserve ID3v2 tags on the output file; some strip them. After cutting, check the file in your player — if the metadata is gone, you can re-add it in Mp3tag (Windows), Kid3 (Linux/macOS), or directly from the Finder/Properties panel. Embedded album art typically survives ID3v2 round-trips at the same rate as text tags.
Yes — the cutter runs in any modern mobile browser (iOS Safari 14+, Android Chrome). On iOS the downloaded .mp3 lands in the Files app under "Downloads"; from there you can share to Voice Memos, GarageBand, or any audio app. Android puts it in /Download by default. Note that an iPhone ringtone needs a .m4r file (MP3 to M4R), which you install by syncing it through Finder or iTunes on a computer, or by importing the audio into GarageBand on the iPhone and using Share > Ringtone.
Cutting runs on our servers, so available local memory is not a constraint. Very large MP3s (multi-GB DJ sets, 12-hour audiobook rips) depend only on your upload bandwidth and available server processing time — allow a few extra seconds for files over ~500 MB. There is no hard per-file cap.