HelpMake a biteStep 2 of 4
Mark the moment
The editor opens on the whole episode, all of it marked: your bite is the show until you cut it down. Drag either end of the track inward to trim, drag the middle to slide what's left, and press the bar anywhere to listen from there.
A two-hour show is longer than any screen it gets drawn on, so dragging can only ever get you close — a pixel of one is about twenty seconds. The exact ends come from the Start and End boxes underneath: type a time, press Mark as the playhead goes past, or use the keyboard.
The whole episode is your bite to start with. Drag either end to trim it, and press the bar to listen from anywhere.
Start
MarkEnd
MarkType a time to trim to the second, or press Mark as it plays.
- The episode
- How far in you are, out of how long the show runs. Play from here, and the line on the track below is where you are.
- Your bite
- The whole episode is the track, and it opens with all of it marked. Drag either end to trim inward, drag the middle to slide what is left, and press the bar to listen from anywhere. The bars behind it are never the sound itself — nothing here downloads an episode to draw one. Where the show publishes a transcript they are where the talking is, worked out from the words; where it doesn't, they are an even texture so the track reads as a strip rather than an empty box.
- Start and End
- Where a bite is made exact. Type a time into either box, or press Mark to use wherever the playhead is now. Select an end on the track and the arrow keys move it a second at a time, or five with Shift.
- Play bite
- Plays your bite once, fades and all, so you hear exactly what you are about to send.
The keyboard
Every way of marking sets the same two times, so nothing you do here can disagree with anything else. Drag an end, type a time over it, press Mark as the playhead goes past, or use the keyboard.
- Space
- Play or pause the episode
- I/[
- Set the start to the playhead
- O/]
- Set the end to the playhead
- P
- Play the bite once
- Left arrow/Right arrow
- Move the playhead a second
- Shift+Left arrow/Right arrow
- Ten seconds at a time
- Alt+Left arrow/Right arrow
- A tenth of a second
- C
- Copy the link to the bite as it is now
Chapters and transcripts
Plenty of shows write a list of timestamps into their episode notes — and on YouTube, into the video's chapters. Where one does, those appear under the editor as Chapters, and the track gets a tick at each one. Press a chapter and it plays with the two ends on it, so the moment somebody already named is a bite in one tap. The times are the publisher's own, so treat them as a good starting point and trim from there.
About one podcast in six publishes a transcript, which is rarer but finer. When one does, the episode's words appear too. Search the whole episode for a phrase, press any line to jump the playhead there, and use In and Out on the line that's playing to set your start and end by what was said rather than by the numbers. The track changes too: its bars become where the talking actually is, so the ad break and the long pause show up as gaps in it.