How do I edit an audio file on a Mac?

Double-click most audio files and they open in QuickTime Player or Music. QuickTime can trim: open the file, choose Edit and Trim, drag the yellow handles, click Trim.

That keeps what is between the handles and discards the rest. It cannot remove a section from the middle, change volume, or fix anything.

For chopping the silence off the start and end of a recording, that is genuinely all you need and it takes ten seconds. Duplicate the file first, because the trim is destructive once saved.

GarageBand is free and usually installed. Create an Empty Project with an Audio track, then drag your file onto the timeline.

Command and T splits at the playhead, Delete removes a selected region, and you drag the following region left to close the gap, because GarageBand will not do that for you.

Turn off Follow Tempo and Pitch on the imported region, or speech will be stretched to a musical grid and sound subtly wrong.

It has EQ, compression and limiting under Smart Controls, with usable Voice presets. It has no noise reduction at all, which is its biggest gap.

Audacity is free, open source, and built for exactly this. Cut, trim, fade, noise reduction, compression, EQ, normalisation, batch export, and a very large body of tutorials.

It looks dated and behaves in ways that surprise people, but everything on the list above works and costs nothing. For most audio editing on a Mac it is the correct answer.

Grant it microphone permission in System Settings under Privacy and Security if you intend to record with it as well.

Remember that saving produces an .aup3 project only Audacity opens. To get an MP3 you use File and Export.

For a single quick job, converting a format, trimming, splitting, boosting the volume, a browser tool is often faster than opening anything.

For spoken audio specifically, the browser tools that transcribe and let you edit by deleting text are a genuinely different way of working, and much faster on long recordings than any waveform.

Hilite works that way and we make it, so weigh that as you like. Check what happens to your file with any web tool, and prefer ones that process in the browser for anything sensitive.

Trim the start and end only: QuickTime, already installed, ten seconds.

Cut mistakes, fix levels, remove noise: Audacity. Free, and it does all of it properly.

Add music, build an intro, arrange several pieces: GarageBand, since it is already there and better at assembly than Audacity.

Edit a long conversation and publish it weekly: something built for speech. Editing forty minutes by waveform is an evening per episode, and that is the thing that stops most podcasts.