Trimming your recordings

Every recording you make picks up a moment of quiet before you start speaking and after you finish. The Edit Audio tool lets you trim those edges so your verse sounds clean and immediate when your family listens.

Where to find it

1. Tap your profile photo to open your profile.
2. Tap My Recordings.
3. Find the verse you want to clean up.
4. Tap Edit Audio beneath the recording.

Edit Audio is only available on recordings that belong to you.

Reading the waveform

The editor displays your recording as a row of vertical bars — a picture of the sound from beginning to end.

• Tall bars — your voice. Keep this.
• Short or flat bars at the edges — silence before you started speaking or after you stopped. This is what you trim.

Most recordings look like a flat stretch on the left, a dense cluster of taller bars in the middle, then another flat stretch on the right.

Setting your trim points

Two handles mark the region you want to keep. By default they span the full recording.

• Drag the left handle right to cut silence from the beginning.
• Drag the right handle left to cut silence from the end.

The readout below the waveform shows you exactly how much you are removing from each end and how long the kept section will be. An orange note appears whenever you are cutting time — a helpful reminder to double-check you haven't gone too far.

Preview before you save

Tap Preview to hear only the region between your handles. Use this to confirm:

• The first word is not clipped — leave a tiny sliver of quiet before your voice comes in.
• The last word fades out fully — stop just after the voice trails off, not in the middle of it.

Adjust the handles and preview as many times as you need before committing.

Applying the trim

Tap Apply Trim. The edit is sent to be processed — this usually takes 10–30 seconds. When it is done, the recording card refreshes automatically and your family will hear the trimmed version.

The trim is permanent on the version your family hears, but the original is always kept as a backup (see below).

Restoring the original

If you trim too aggressively — for example, you cut off the first syllable — tap Restore original beneath the recording. This button appears on any recording that has been trimmed.

Restoring brings back the full, untouched recording exactly as it was when you first uploaded it. You can then open Edit Audio and try again with a lighter touch.

Tips

• A breath or a half-second of quiet before the verse starts is perfectly natural — trim the long dead air, not all of it.
• You can trim and restore as many times as you like.
• If a recording sounds fine as-is, there is no need to trim it.