Wave Slicer is on the App Store
The iPhone version is live. The same slicing you just did, running natively on your phone — plus recording straight from the microphone. Free, no ads, no account, nothing collected.
Android version coming soon
Wave Slicer is in closed testing on Google Play. Leave your address and you get one email when it lands. Nothing else.
How to use
1. Load
Drop an audio file onto the waveform, or use Load file. WAV and MP3 work everywhere; Ogg and FLAC will not decode in Safari. You can also record straight from your microphone — the browser asks permission once.
In the app: twelve sounds are built in, so there is something to cut the moment you open it. Pick one from the dropdown, use Open file, or send an audio file to Wave Slicer from Files, Voice Memos or any app’s share sheet. Record works the same way, and the recording never leaves your device.
2. Zoom
Scroll to zoom around the cursor and drag sideways to move. Keep zooming and you end up looking at the individual samples rather than a drawn envelope. That is the point: it is where you can see exactly what you are cutting.
In the app: two fingers sideways to move, up and down to zoom, or the plus and minus buttons. Fit puts the whole file back on screen.
3. Select
Drag across the waveform. Pull the amber edges to adjust one side, drag the middle to move the whole selection without changing its length, or drag outside it to start a new one.
Snap to zero crossing is on by default, and it is what keeps a cut from clicking. A waveform crosses zero many times a second; landing the cut on one of those crossings means the sound starts and ends at silence instead of jumping to a value, which is what you hear as a click.
4. Listen
Play the selection and loop it. Everything you change is audible while it runs and none of it touches the original file — the source stays exactly as you loaded it until you export.
In the browser: Space plays, L loops.
5. Shape
The chain runs in a fixed order and you hear every change as you make it.
- Mono, DC, reverse — fold to mono, remove any DC offset, play the selection backwards.
- Transpose — up or down two octaves in semitones. This is varispeed, so the selection gets shorter as it goes up, the way a tape machine behaves.
- High-pass and low-pass with shared resonance.
- Drive — soft saturation. It compensates its own level, so it adds weight and grit rather than volume.
- Bit depth and downsample — the two halves of what people call bitcrushing. One coarsens the values, the other coarsens the timing.
- Echo with feedback and mix.
- Reverb with size, decay and mix. With Keep tail on, a slice keeps ringing past its own end instead of being cut off.
6. The envelope
The amplitude envelope is drawn by hand. Tap the line to add a point, drag a point to move it, and drag the square between two points to bend the curve between them. A bend reshapes the path between two levels, so a segment whose ends sit at the same height has nothing to reshape — move a point up or down first and the handles come alive.
It is the same envelope drawing as the kick pitch curve in Drum Rack, and it is the fastest way to turn a flat sample into something with a shape.
7. Fades and loop
Short fades on both ends, linear or exponential, two milliseconds by default — enough to kill a click, short enough to hear nothing.
The loop crossfade folds the end of the selection over its start, which is what makes a loop come round without a seam. It shortens the loop by that much, so a long crossfade eats into what you selected.
8. Export
Choose 16 or 24-bit and write the file. TPDF dither is available on 16-bit, which smooths the step down from a higher bit depth into something that sounds like quiet noise rather than distortion.
In the browser: it lands in your downloads folder. In the app: the system save dialog opens and the file goes where you put it. Either way the name carries the source and the length, so you can find it again in a DAW browser three weeks later.
What it does not do
Everything happens on your own machine. In the browser, nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored. In the app there is no account, no advertising and no analytics; audio you load, record or export never leaves the device.
Where it comes from
Wave Slicer is part of the Lumlux Art Lab, a set of free tools for people who make music. The effect chain is the one I use on my own releases as FDR-Sound, which is why it is built the way it is rather than the way a feature list would suggest.
Made in Antwerp.