Silence Injection on Clipping - possible?

Hiya. I’ve been using Audacity to produce audiobooks for the past two years, at a nice little profit to myself. I appreciate the hard work that’s been put into creating this program. I especially like the Truncate Silence function, which is a huge help to me because I’m one of those miserable people who likes to take their time. There may be five, or six, seconds between each sentence I read; being able to neatly bring it all together is a huge help.

In most narratives, there are pauses, here and there; page breaks, sub-headings, and the like. Typically, what I do is clap once, very hard, to force the audio to clip; this tells me, when looking at the wave-form, where I need to inject a two-second pause.

But I wonder, is it possible to automate this process? So that, where the application recognizes an instance of clipping, it injects a second of silence on either side of the clipped audio? I’m really not that technical so I can’t be sure if it’s even possible, but just thought I’d drop it out there.

Thanks.

Steve has made plugins called PopMute : which identifies loud noises and silences them,
and ExtendSilence: which is the opposite of truncate silence.

What you’ve specified would be a combination of the two plugins : identify the loud (clipping) clap, silence it, and insert more silence at that point. So it seems possible.

Do you really want to leave the clipped audio in ?

but please note that these are “Nyquist plug-ins” and some Nyquist plug-ins may fail with very long tracks. Most Nyquist plug-ins should be fine with up to an hour of audio at 44100 or 48000 Hz sample rate, provided that your computer has a reasonable amount of RAM.

No no, I don’t want to leave the clipping portion in; I want, if possible, for it to be replaced with silence of a certain duration.

Most of the chapters of the books I read are not quite an hour or so; my system has 8GB of RAM running at 1866MHz, but my processor is a wimpy little dual-core. What would be required to combine these Nyquist plug-ins?

Steve’s brain. :smiley:

Or, apply the plugins sequentially …
First use Pop Mute, set to replace the loud claps with true-silence.
Then apply Extend Silence, with the threshold set so it only is applied to true-silence.

You may have just saved me hours of editing. Thank you! This is brilliant!

Okay. Dredging up a dead topic, but I forgot what settings I’d had to change to get the Pop Mute to inject actual silence instead of just minimizing things. I’d figured it out once but now I’m an idiot and installed a new computer and don’t have the old one with the settings I used.

Ah… any chance you could help a guy out? (Sorry to bother, thank you!)

suggested Pop-Mute settings.png
You can increase the Pop-Mute threshold to say -0.05dB, that gives you a tiny bit more headroom, but that creates a click.

suggested ''Extend-Silence'' settings.png