I have W7 and audacity 2.0.5. Can someone give me a little help in simple terms for using truncate silence or what I need to remove silence in my recordings. I record audio sometime from streams that stop and start. (I know I need a better ISP, coming hopefully soon.) I end up with around 10-20% of dead air. I have used truncate if that is what I should use with the levels of min and max 5 millisecond, 4:1 compression and -40 db level. The result is not real bad, but it will remove too lengthy of a section in some parts and I also seem to be getting a speeded up playback so people speaking sound a little funny. I have experimented and am still having problems and the audacity info pages leave me confused. What do I need to adjust or experiment with to do a better job? Thanks for any help.
Sometimes Audacity will try to open up advanced sound files it doesn’t really understand. That can give you chipmunk voices. Install the FFMpeg software to help with that. You can have a much more serious problem with a computer not running fast enough for good recordings. That can give you chipmunk voices, too.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_installation_and_plug_ins.html#ffdown
Truncate Silence can give odd results if the gaps aren’t really silent. Most Audacity tools work on the tallness of blue waves on the timeline, not how loud things are, so for example, one good cat hair on a record can really mess up the software that figures out where the stop and start of music is.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/truncate_silence.html
Koz
See this thread: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-remove-skips/35063/1
basically Truncate Silence is much improved for the alpha 2.0.6 (which may be released soon) - you can download the alpha and just use it for the silence removal using 2.0.5 for the rest of your processing if you are wary of using the alpha version.
WC
-40 dB may be a little bit too high and regard too much audio as “silence”.
Gradually move up from -80 dB.
Due to a bug, the -80 dB setting does not work. This will be fixed in Audacity 2.0.6.