Trim an MP3 on your Mac
Sep 16, 2010 - 24 Comments
You can trim any MP3 file for free in Mac OS X thanks to the bundled QuickTime Player app, which comes preinstalled on every single Mac. Though we’ll cover trimming MP3’s, it turns out you can actually use QuickTime to trim just about any audio file, as the app supports many more other audio formats too. So, if you want to quickly trim down an audio file in Mac OS X without downloading any other apps or software, read on, it’s a piece of cake and works with all versions of Mac OS X.
How to Trim MP3, m4a and Audio in Mac OS X
Here’s how to trim MP3’s and audio on a Mac using the built-in QuickTime tools:
- Make a copy of the MP3 file you want to trim
- Open the MP3 file with QuickTime Player, you can launch the app from /Applications/ and then drag the MP3 file to edit into the QuickTime Dock icon
- Hit Command+T to open the Trim function, or, you can also find the Trim function under the “Edit” menu
- Drag the yellow sliders on the left and right side to trim down the section of the song to where you want, press the play button to confirm the audio segment is where you want things to be
- When you’re finished, click the yellow ‘Trim’ button
- Go to File → Save As and save as an appropriate file type, you’ll have several options if you choose “Save As” or “Export”, but most users will want to pick the “m4a” format, or the iPhone .m4v movie file as the saved file
Now the MP3 has been trimmed down the section of the song you wanted. If the file is m4a, aac, m4v, or otherwise, you can use iTunes to convert the song to MP3 format again. Otherwise you can just keep it in the current file format. M4a is basically a variation of the popular mp3 format and works just fine across many platforms, while still retaining high quality sound and good compression.
This works in the newer versions of QuickTime Player for just about every version of OS X ever released, ranging from Snow Leopard to OS X Mavericks, El Capitan, and presumably into the future.