Fastest way to display waveform of 12 hour mp3s?

[Pete]

Hi, new Audacity user here.

I record internet radio via VLC, each resulting mp3 is 12 hours. But some of the recordings don’t contain music (only some low level noise). I need a way to check the files and delete the “empty” ones.

Via Audacity’s waveform it’s easy to tell whether a recording contains music or not - but I need to check several hundred files, so I’d like to know whether there’s anything I can do to speed up the import. It currently takes around 75 seconds to import a 12 hours mp3 (on Mac Studio, 64 GB RAM) which is already impressive.

Are there any preferences I could change? Is there e.g. a way to generate the waveform less detailed? Or is there maybe a CLI tool or another app that’s better for this specific job?

[Trebor]

@Pete

Via Audacity’s waveform it’s easy to tell whether a recording contains music or not …

Even easier if you use the spectrogram display, rather than the default waveform display. Spectrogram View - Audacity Manual

It may be possible to create a macro to batch-process the “several hundred files” … Macros - Audacity Manual

[Pete]

Thanks! Ended up writing an AppleScript that skips +1h thru the current track in VLC. Still took some hours to review the recordings this way but it was definitely faster than letting Audacity (or another app) calculate the tracks.