It seems that many of the files I’ve ripped from CDS have unnecessarily long silences at the end and I find myself trimming it off over and over again. I tried the Truncate Silence effect to see if I could automate the process but it doesn’t seem to work very well for what I want it to do. Would anyone know how to set up this tool to do what I want, or is there another one that would work better? Almost every song is different so cutting of the same amount from every one wouldn’t work.
Describe what you want to do. Always trim the end silence to a specific length? Truncate Silence can do that. For example, if you want the silence at the end to be truncated to 500 milliseconds (ms), set both Min and Max to 500 ms. Setting Min and Max to the same amount means you can ignore the compression factor.
As long as there are no silences elsewhere in the selection of 500 ms or greater, the end silence only will be truncated to 500 ms.
If you are not getting the silence truncated right down to 500 ms, increase the threshold (make it a less negative number).
See: Audacity Manual .
You could also look at this plug-in: Trim Silence which truncates silence at the start and end only to almost nothing, but never truncates silence elsewhere in the audio. It may be easier to use (if you do not select the start of the track) if there are near-silences in the audio of the track that are meant to be there.
Gale
Hi Gale. I tried Trim Silence and it should be useful in some situations.
Here’s what I’m dealing with. When a song fades out at the end, oftentimes the waves stop but the sound goes on even though all you see is a thin line that looks like silence, so there’s no clear indication of where the music actually ends. I have to zoom in and find where it stops, then leave a couple of seconds of silence and trim off the rest. I’m looking for something that can do that for me, possibly a long shot, but I was hoping.
For both Truncate Silence and Trim Silence, the audio level that is regarded as “silence” is set by the “Threshold” control.
If these are pop songs that are loud everywhere until the end, then you should be able to use Truncate Silence to leave 2 seconds of “what looks like silence” at the end, by setting Min and Max to 2 seconds and setting an appropriate threshold level.
Truncate Silence deletes audio detected as silence from the middle of the selection, so you should be sure you really can’t hear what you want to delete at any practical volume level, or use Edit > Remove Audio or Labels > Silence Audio on the 2 seconds of “looks like silence” that remains.
Gale
Thanks for that Gale. I read about Sound Finder in another thread and it seems to be very reliable at finding where the sound ends. So using that, and setting it to leave one second of silence at the end, I’m able to quickly see where to cut. 