When you have a long recording — an audiobook, a lecture series, or a multi-part interview — you often want it as separate files rather than one big track. With audiocutter.online you can split a single recording into chapters and download every chapter as its own file, bundled together in a ZIP with a playlist. Everything runs in your browser; your audio is never uploaded to a server.
This workflow is useful whenever a single audio file really represents several distinct parts. Expand the cases below to see what fits your project:
Split a full narration into one file per chapter so any audiobook player can list and navigate them. Name each fragment after its chapter and the player shows a clean table of contents.
A two-hour recording becomes a set of short, focused files — one per topic — that students can jump between and resume without scrubbing through a single long track.
Slice a long episode into segments — intro, interview, ad read, outro — or pull individual questions out as shareable clips, each as its own file.
Turn a continuous live set or mixtape into individual tracks while keeping them ordered and grouped together by the playlist.
Four steps take you from one long recording to a folder of named chapters with a playlist.
Open the cutter and choose your audio file, or drag and drop it onto the page. Almost all formats are supported: MP3, WAV, OGG, M4A, FLAC, AAC and more. You can even drop in a video file and its audio will be extracted automatically.
New to the editor? The how to cut audio file online guide walks through selecting, playing, and zooming around your recording.
Move the cursor to the point where one chapter should end and the next should begin, then split the recording there. Repeat at every boundary.
Rename the fragments so the exported files have meaningful names — "01 Introduction", "02 The Journey Begins", and so on. The fragment names become the file names inside the playlist, which keeps the downloaded chapters easy to browse and in the right order.
Tip: Prefixing names with numbers (01, 02, 03…) keeps chapters sorted correctly in file managers and players that order alphabetically.
Open the Download menu and choose Download playlist. Pick your output format and quality (for example MP3 at 192 kbps), give the playlist a name, and confirm. The editor renders each chapter one at a time — you'll see the progress as it goes — and then hands you a single ZIP file to save.
Don't see the option? Download playlist appears once your project has at least two fragments — make at least one split first.
The ZIP archive contains two things:
Each chapter is a standalone file. Drag them into any player, phone, or audiobook app — they work perfectly well on their own, with no playlist required.
An .m3u8 file is just a simple text list of tracks. Most media players — VLC, foobar2000, and many audiobook and podcast apps — can open it and play the chapters back to back in the correct order, as if it were a single continuous recording.
Keep them together: the playlist refers to the audio files by name, so the .m3u8 and the chapter files should stay in the same folder.
Need something other than a full set of chapters? Use Download file to export the whole edited recording as one track, or Download fragment to export just one chapter. And before you export, you can add smooth starts and endings to each chapter with fade-in and fade-out.