I am also using this for language learning and this is almost exactly the plugin I need.
Is there a way it can be modified to have the option to add the silence to the End or Beginning of the track automatically? (instead of inserting it where silence already is)
Reason is, I have each sentence as 1 track, and I am trying to create 2 other versions - One with silence after (for repeating), and one with silence before (to say the sentence before the ‘answer’)
But with such short tracks, and sometimes not perfect recordings, it is not about extending silence, but just adding the right durations of silence, either to the beginning or the end.
Another, less important option (for me at least), question: what about reducing silence to the correct duration? for instance, for a track with several sentences, but too much silence in between several phrases. Is there a way to put in just the right amount of silence, reducing if necessary, and adding if necessary?
Also, is there a way to bulk add an effect like this to each track individually instead of summing everything together, or having to repeat the effect for each track separately?
Unfortunately “Nyquist plug-ins” cannot tell the difference between empty track space (“white space”) and “silence”. They are also not able to see where audio clips start/end. Nyquist plug-ins can therefore not be reliably used for processes where the start/end of audio clips need to be considered. Rather, Nyquist plug-ins can only act on the current “selection”. However, please see this section in the manual about batch processing: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/chains_for_batch_processing_and_effects_automation.html
Thanks. I have used the trim/extend plugin, but what I am going for is the ability to modify the amount of silence added relative to the selection/length of the audio or track.
Well, it does work but not perfectly.
I was able to extend the silences in the program to meet the minimum.
But what I noted there was a “thump” that hit about -30db when the additional time was added.
You couldn’t hear it but it bumped the VU meters. The timer and time remaining don’t work.
When the timer ran out it just sat for a couple minutes before it completed.
Thanks for the feedback.
The “thump” is probably due to the sudden change between low level noise in the “silence” that you are extending and the “absolute silence” that is inserted by the effect.
That is quite a tricky “problem” to address automatically because different use cases will probably require different approaches. One method would be for the effect to add a short fade-out to the original audio before inserting the silence and a short fade-in when returning to the original audio. Another approach would be to insert low level noise rather than absolute silence. There are probably other approaches too, but I can’t think of a general method that will suit all applications. The “best approach” is to use the effect on audio where the gaps to be extended are already “silent” (very low level) - for audio where that is not possible, use of a noise gate prior to inserting the silences may help.
…inserting additional silence > at the end > of each detected silence…
Hi Steve! Your plugin is amazingly useful! But it cuts some nearly quiet beginnigs of words. Could you add an option to choose where silences to insert: at begins, MIDDLES or ends of detected silences?! Thank you!
Thinking about language tutorial patterns like “Native sentence - Pause - Foreign translation” or “Question - Pause - Answer”, the fourth way to stretch the pauses have to be here:
The amount of silence inserted as a proportion of the length of the answer, that sounds after the silent pause.
When we have decided on the desired features, I propose this as the next plugin to be promoted to http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Download_Nyquist_Plug-ins. Then we would have a logical group Extend Silence, Trim / Extend, Trim Silence.
This is fun, thanks! I experimented with it to extend guided meditation sessions. In my case and for this speaker and recording setup, good thresholds seem to be -60 dB and a min detected silence of at least 5 seconds (not to introduce weird silences in the middle of sentences). To extend a 10 min session into 20 min, I then extend the silence by 100% of its own length + 100% of the preceding sound.
However:
I have various silences which can’t be reliably auto detected by thresholds and then need to move silences around manually. Being able to specify the silence locations by a series of labels in order to apply the effect automatically based on them, could be useful. Alternately, I need to place my labels then make sure that there is indeed a gap of 5 seconds between them (and none within), before applying the effect.
the plugin doesn’t allow a min detected silence of more than 10 seconds, nor a % of detected silence or a % of previous sound of more than 100%, although such values would be valid. (I guess I could fix this for myself by editing the script, but this should probably be fixed before being offered as a standard.)
the progress bar doesn’t estimate correctly how long the effect will take to apply (gets to 100% then waits several more seconds before finishing)
This increases the maximum setting of “Min detected silences (seconds)” to 60 (1 minute). The three numbers at the end are: “default” (1 second), “minimum value” (0.1 second), “maximum value” (60 seconds).
Unfortunately I don’t think that can be fixed, at least, not without some major changes to how Audacity implements Nyquist plug-ins. The plug-in code itself runs very quickly, as is shown by the progress bar, but all that the plug-in does is to calculate where and how much silence to add. Audacity then needs to copy the entire audio data into RAM, insert the silences, write the resulting audio to disk and redraw the waveform. It’s this latter part that takes the time, but that all occurs outside of the progress loop that is being timed.
Hi,
First let me thank you for such a useful plug-in. Actually I first searched and came across your plug-in and then installed Audacity only to use this plug-in.
I want to add silence more than 100% of previous sound duration. How should I edit the code to remove or increase that maximum? Not sure if this is the answer: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/extend-silences/34612/10
Let’s assume several seconds of speaking in the audio won’t go below the average silence threshold you’ve set. So no silence will be inserted in that part and that long chunk will be harder to listen and repeat. In such case if you set a higher threshold, the whole audio file will be divided into very short segments which is impractical.
It would be great if an option was added to “Extend silences” plug-in for setting a limiting duration and a higher second threshold. If sound segments get longer than that, then it’ll search inside them for a higher silence threshold and this way segmenting them to shorter pieces like the rest of audio.
If you have several audios with several of those high threshold segments in them, manual scanning, selecting and running effect for each segment will take a very long time.
Yes, but still much quicker than manually extending each silence.
If there was an option was added to “Extend silences” plug-in for setting a limiting duration and a higher second threshold, how would the plug-in know which parts to use the higher threshold on, and which to use the lower threshold?
