remove the silent portions between random sounds or words

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

On a similar note, I’d like to detect and remove the silent portions between random sounds or words. However I’d like to leave the space in the audio. Similar the split cut feature. I don’t want the timing of the sounds to change. Is there a plug-in for that.

Trimming silence at the end is okay though.

Thanks in advance.

2

Seems to be unrelated to the original post, so split to new topic.

In what way different from the split cut feature?

3

That would give you the same result as doing nothing, unless the silent portions are not absolute silence but low level noise. Is removing low level noise what you are trying to do?


Gale

4

Correct.
here’s a scenario.

A panel discussion with 4 participants each miked to different tracks.
the original file would be 1hr of continuous audio x4 tracks. though most of the time 3 tracks would be silent as they are listening to the other participant. removing the low level content leaving just the content per track in the correct timing could reduce the project file size 75%!

here’s another use case.
track 1 music
track 2 regular verses
track 3 occasional spoken words or phrases. (but it could be any sound.)

Instead of track 3 of continuous 24/96 audio,
if there was a way to automatically remove the silent or near silent passages on track 3.
However leaving the remaining clips in the proper location relative to the other tracks.

I know a noise gate can work to remove drop the noise floor in those parts but it’s still continuous audio.

I guess i’m thinking in terms of storage efficiency as much as noise levels.

5

So I did a little more experimentation. 1 track 1.5 minutes at 32/96.
I duplicated the track and manually used control-alt-x to remove the dead space.
The attached screen shot shows the difference in the tracks. I saved each track to a new single track file. Before and edited.
Here are the resulting project and exported file sizes.

            Audacity file        WAV32         MP3 CBR    MP3 VBR  
Before:     35MB                 70.7MB        2.9MB      925KB
Edited:     11MB                 70.7MB        2.9MB      564KB

So the space saving is significant for the project and variable bitrate mp3 file sizes.
This is just 90 seconds of audio.

So instead of manually identifying and control-alt-x the space, I was hoping for an automated way to find “silence” then remove it.
before after.JPG

6

I’d expect there to be a similar space saving if you simply gate those quiet parts to absolute silence.
Setting the “dither” option to “rectangle” may shave a bit more off if you silence the quiet parts (depending on the compressed format used).