How to edit an audio file on iPhone

Open a recording in Voice Memos, tap the three dots, and choose Edit Recording. You get a waveform and a set of tools that are genuinely useful.

Tap the crop icon and drag the yellow handles to select a region. Then Trim keeps what is inside the handles, and Delete removes it and closes the gap. That second one is what lets you cut a mistake from the middle.

You can also record over a section: place the playhead, tap Replace, and the new audio overwrites from that point. Useful for fixing a fluffed sentence without starting again.

There is an Enhance Recording toggle in the same menu, which reduces background noise and room sound. It is a single switch with no settings, and on a middling recording it helps.

Voice Memos edits its own recordings. A file someone sent you, or one saved from the web, will not simply appear there.

The usual route is the share sheet. Open the file, tap share, and look for Voice Memos in the app list. It is not always offered depending on format.

This is the main frustration with editing on iPhone: the good built-in editor is walled off from files that did not originate in it. When the share sheet does not offer it, use one of the routes below instead.

GarageBand is free on iPhone and handles multiple tracks, volume automation, fades and a set of effects. Create an Audio Recorder track, then use the loop browser to import a file from Files or iCloud Drive.

It is considerably more capable than Voice Memos and considerably more fiddly, because it is a music program being used on a small screen for something it was not designed for.

Turn off the metronome and set the track to not follow tempo, or your speech will be pulled to a musical grid.

Export with the share button and choose Song, then a format. GarageBand's project files do not open anywhere else.

Safari on iPhone can upload files to a web tool and download the result, which sidesteps the import problem entirely. Any file in the Files app can go straight into a browser-based editor.

This is usually the fastest way to trim, convert, split or clean up a file that did not originate on the phone, and there is nothing to install.

For anything sensitive, prefer tools that process in the browser rather than uploading to a server, and check before you upload someone else's recording.

Hilite works this way, including removing noise and filler words, and we make it, so weigh that as you like.

Trimming, cutting one mistake, converting a format, cleaning up a voice note: all fine on a phone, and often faster than getting to a computer.

Editing a forty-minute conversation is not. The screen is too small to see a waveform in useful detail, and precise cuts with a fingertip on a two-inch timeline are guesswork.

The phone is a genuinely good recorder, though. The microphone is decent, it is always with you, and a recording made on a phone and edited elsewhere is a perfectly normal workflow.

Record where you are, edit where you have a screen.