Cut audio from YouTube to WAV or MP3 — free, no software

Step 1 — Paste the link and get a waveform

Drop the video's URL into the editor and hit Extract Audio. Regular watch URLs, Shorts, and live or embed links are all recognized. A few seconds later the full audio track appears as an interactive waveform — peaks and silences visible, which is what makes finding a precise moment fast.

Step 2 — Drag the selection over the part you want

The highlighted region on the waveform is your cut. There is no separate "mark in / mark out" mode:

• Drag the region's edges to set where the cut starts and ends.
• Click the waveform to seek, then play or loop the selection to check it by ear.
• Zoom in for precision — with the waveform stretched out, you can land an edge right on a word boundary or a drum hit.

Loop the selection while you nudge the edges; when it sounds clean on repeat, it is ready.

Step 3 — Download it as WAV or MP3

Download the selection in either format: WAV (uncompressed — the right choice if the clip is going into an editor or a project) or MP3 at 320 kbps (small, plays anywhere). The file contains exactly the range you selected.

Not sure which format? WAV never adds compression artifacts and every editor accepts it, so it is the right pick if the clip is going into an edit, a layer, or a re-export. MP3 is roughly a tenth of the size and plays anywhere — the right pick if you just want to listen or send it to someone.

Or take the whole track, untouched

Sometimes you do not want a section at all. The download menu also offers the full track as WAV, and that path is special: the file is streamed to you exactly as extracted — no re-encode, no processing — with your browser's own progress bar. Expect real sizes; uncompressed stereo runs on the order of 10 MB per minute, so a long track is a big file. A full-track MP3 at 320 kbps is encoded on demand and comes out far smaller.

The one-step version: edit the URL

You can skip the paste step entirely. On any YouTube video, edit the address bar and swap the domain:

youtube.com/watch?v=… → youtubecut.com/watch?v=…

Press Enter and you land in the editor with extraction already running. If the URL carries a timestamp (?t=90), a ten-second selection starting at that moment is pre-selected — so a "check 1:30" link turns into an almost-finished cut.

What “lossless” honestly means here

A WAV from this editor is a lossless copy of the best audio YouTube serves: extraction takes the highest-quality stream available, and the WAV path never compresses it again. What no converter can do — this one included — is restore detail YouTube's own compression already discarded. Any site promising "studio quality" from a YouTube link is overselling.

The practical upshot still favours WAV: from the moment of extraction onward there is zero further loss, which is exactly what you want in a file you are about to edit.

Keep the cut: banks and permanent links

Two ways to hold on to what you cut, beyond the downloaded file:

• Add cut banks the current selection so you can keep cutting more from the same video — each banked cut can be renamed, previewed, and downloaded on its own.
• Publish it (the one action that asks you to sign in) and the cut gets its own permanent page with a link you can share — anyone who opens it can play or download the cut without redoing any of this.

If you are cutting musical material to build on, how to sample from YouTube walks the same editor from a producer's angle. To do the same cut from inside ChatGPT or Claude, see use Samplecut in ChatGPT and Claude. And as ever: the audio belongs to whoever made the video — clear the rights for anything beyond personal use.