Copied from Sound Finder / Silence Finder improvements :
“Yes, but I think new users will have much more trouble with marking sounds than silence. They can understand placing a marker to split in silence.”
The current “Silence Finder” is possibly misnamed.
The silences are “marked” (as in the file name “SilenceMarker.ny”) but (apart from a label in trailing silence, if present) the labels are not created by finding silence but by finding sounds.
;If this sample is NOT silent and the previous samples were silent
;then mark the passage.
(if (and (> v thres) (> sil-c sil-length))
;Mark the user-set number of seconds BEFORE this point to avoid clipping the start
;of the material.
(add-label (- (/ n s1-srate) labelbeforedur) "S")
After detecting the start of the sound, a label is created at “labelbeforedur” seconds earlier than the onset of the sound.
In most common cases these labels will occur during silences, but this is not necessarily the case, for example:
- Minimum duration of silence = 0.1
- Label placement = 1.0
The first label is placed within a sound, not within a silence.
The second label is placed within a silence, but the “wrong” silence.
I’m not suggesting that this is a bug (garbage in, garbage out), but it is not actually “marking silences”.
This code also provides an explanation of why the default label position is not zero:
As per “proposed enhancement 2” (Bug Fix. Label positions are currently about 0.01 seconds late. (It is not possible to make the label positions exact without making the plug-in much slower, but it is possible to improve accuracy and ensure that the label positions do not trim the sound.), setting the label position 0 seconds “before silence ends” can actually cause the labels to occur after the silence ends, thus clipping the start of the material. A non-zero default is a workaround for this (imo) “bug”.
“They can understand placing a marker to split in silence.”
but with the current implementation they may be misunderstanding.
If the plug-in is intended to mark silences, then it should “mark silences” - the labels should always occur within the silence to which they relate.
If the plug-in is intended to do what it currently does (mark a point before the start of a sound) then the name “Silence Finder” and the description in the manual are misleading as they imply that the plug-in finds and labels silences, which is not how it works and in some cases not what it does.
“Many will be looking for Silence Finder because hardware documentation has referred to it for years (and probably will do so for many years yet).”
Isn’t that a red herring? Obsolete third party documentation has never stopped Audacity from progressing and imho should not do so (otherwise we would still have Audacity 1.2.x). There’s plenty of third party documentation still in circulation that refer to “Audio I/O” preferences.
“I think the bug fixes should be implemented. They should not be something for users to vote on unless the bug can be viewed as a “feature”.”
I agree that they should be implemented, but I included them in the vote options just in case anyone wanted to argue that they are “features”.
Summary:
- Silence Finder is not actually a silence finder but a sound finder that uses point labels before the sound.
- If we want a real “Silence Marker” then the current plug-in does not do that and needs to be replaced with a plug-in that does mark silences.
- If we want to keep the current “Silence Finder” effect then imo it needs the proposed bug fixes and should not be called “Silence Finder” → If it is not called “silence finder” then it could easily have “region labels” added as an option.