You trim a clip, play it back, and there's a faint click or pop right at the start or end. It's one of the most common little annoyances in audio editing — and once you understand what causes it, the fix takes two seconds.
Audio is a wave that constantly rises and falls above and below a center line (silence). When you cut at a random spot, you almost never land exactly on that center line — you land partway up the wave, at some non-zero value. That creates a sudden vertical jump: the signal leaps from silence straight to wherever you cut, or drops from your cut point straight to silence.
Your speaker has to reproduce that instant jump, and a near-instant change in level is heard as a click or pop. The bigger the jump — the further from the center line you cut — the louder the click. It's not a glitch or a corrupted file; it's the physics of an abrupt edge in the sound.
The solution is to ease the edge to zero instead of jumping to it. A very short fade — even a few milliseconds — ramps the volume smoothly from silence at the start, and down to silence at the end, so there's no sudden step for the speaker to reproduce. The click simply disappears.
This is exactly what a fade in and fade out does. You don't need a long, dramatic fade to fix a click; a brief one at each edge is enough, and it's short enough that you won't hear the fade itself — only the absence of the click.
No. It's a normal result of cutting across a moving waveform, not corruption. The audio itself is fine.
It depends where the wave happened to be at the cut point. Land near the center line and there's no audible jump; land near a peak and you get a louder click. That's why it seems random.
Very short — a few milliseconds up to a fraction of a second is plenty to remove a click without changing how the clip sounds.
Cutting on silences and adding short fades at every edge will eliminate them in almost all cases. It's the standard habit for clean edits.
Related: How to add a fade in and fade out · How to trim a recording · All guides