How to cut a track in GarageBand

Select the region you want to cut, position the playhead where the cut should happen, and press Command and T. The region becomes two.

It is also under Edit, Split Regions at Playhead, if you would rather use the menu. The keyboard shortcut is worth learning because you will use it constantly.

The region has to be selected first. If nothing happens when you press Command and T, that is almost always why: the playhead is in the right place but no region is highlighted.

Select several regions across different tracks and Command and T cuts all of them at the same point, which keeps a multi-person recording in sync.

Split either side of the section you want gone, select the middle piece, and press Delete. The audio disappears and a silent gap remains where it was.

GarageBand has no ripple delete, so nothing moves up automatically. You then drag the following region left until it meets the one before it.

This is the single biggest difference between GarageBand and an editor built for speech, and it is why editing a long conversation here is slow. Every removed um is three actions rather than one.

If there are other tracks, they do not move with it, so you have to drag every track's region by the same amount or the recording goes out of sync.

To remove material from the start or end of a region, do not split it. Hover over the region's lower edge until the cursor changes, then drag inwards.

This is non-destructive. The audio is still there, just hidden, and dragging back outwards restores it. That makes it much safer than splitting and deleting when you are not certain.

For trimming the false start at the beginning of a take and the throat-clearing at the end, this is the whole job.

A cut in speech is invisible because of placement, not technique. Cut in the pause before a breath rather than in the gap between two words in the same phrase.

Speech has a rhythm, and removing a chunk from mid-phrase leaves two halves running together at a pace nobody speaks at. Every word is right and something still sounds wrong.

Leave about a third of a second of pause after a join. Edits that are too tight are the most common reason edited speech sounds rushed.

If a join clicks, apply a very short region fade at the edge in the editor pane. A few hundredths of a second is inaudible as a fade and removes the click completely.

For a five-minute recording with a dozen edits, GarageBand is fine and free. Split, delete, drag, done.

For forty minutes of conversation with two hundred small cuts, the manual gap closing becomes the entire task, and one missed drag puts everything after it out of sync.

That is the point at which people either stop editing carefully or stop podcasting, and it is worth recognising before you spend six weeks discovering it.

Hilite closes cuts automatically and applies them across every speaker's track at once, because editing happens through the transcript. We make it, so weigh that accordingly.