Macro/automation for selecting periods of silence?

Audacity Help Forum GNU/Linux
1

I spend a lot of time listening to recorded speech that I need to cut/trim, removing errors and extraneous recording takes.

Often there are longer or shorter pauses in the recorded track than I want to keep, so I select the periods of silence and then paste in the duration of room noise/silence. For example, if it had been three seconds long with some background noise, I select the section then paste in 1 second of room tone and everything plays great.

The only problem is that I end up doing this a lot, and I’m looking for a way to make my workflow more efficient so I’m not constantly mousing and pasting.

Is there a way to automate this, to have Audacity search for the next instance of silence (or near-silence, in this case) and select it?

I have attached an image to illustrate what I mean. In this case, the cursor is currently at a section where I just pasted room noise. The selection that is highlighted is where I am about to paste over with room noise. I would like to automate this selection of silence so I can merely approve or do the pasting in a more efficient manner.
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2

Silence finder, finds but does not select silence.

3

Well, this guy thinks it’d be cool if it did.

I wonder how difficult it would be to code an add-on that could accomplish this? It’s definitely out of my skill range, but out of curiosity, I wonder-

4

Not hugely difficult, though Audacity can only have one selection at a time, so it probably wouldn’t help very much.

A better approach might be to use Sound Finder, then split the audio tracks at the label positions
(https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/edit_menu_labeled_audio.html#split)

You can then step from one audio clip to the next using the shortcuts “Alt + .” and “Alt + ,”
(https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/select_menu_clip_boundaries.html)

5

Thanks - I’ll look into that-

6

or

ffmpeg
(non-GUI option, command line, more programming/technically advanced)

ffmpeg -i input.wav -af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB output.wav

see
stack overflow - using ffmpeg with silencedetect to remove audio silence
stack overflow - using sox to detect silence
ffmpeg doc’s

7

“Removing” silences isn’t a problem with Audacity - just use the “Truncate Silence” effect (with appropriate settings) https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/truncate_silence.html

However, the original post isn’t asking to just remove silences.