There are a number of places in Audacity where one is allowed to enter or view a time value. In every instance (that I have noted, with the exception of the Silence Finder… dialogue) the shortest interval allowed is one second. I would find it very helpful to be able to enter fractions of a second such as 1.5 seconds or, at the extreme, 1.05 seconds. One place where this would be especially helpful is Generate/Silence…
For Generate Silence in Audacity 1.3.x
Click on that little black arrow just to the right of the duration numbers. You can then select the time format that you want. For finest control, use one of the formats that includes “Samples”. If you don’t need it quite that find, there’s a couple of options that go down to milliseconds.
In Silence Finder you can enter fractions of a second by typing the required value into the box.
In general, Nyquist plug-ins can work with very precise time values (down to milliseconds, or even individual samples, depending on the plug-in) however there may be other factors that limit the precision that is possible. In the case of the Silence Finder, the average sound is level is calculated in blocks of length 0.01 second so the precision is limited to around twice this amount (about 20 milliseconds). Greater accuracy could be achieved by reducing the blocksize, but processing would take longer.
Thank you! I hadn’t clicked on that little black arrow – stupid me.