Eliminate silence at end or beginning of tracks

[xaviervs]

I love Opera, and I ripped all my cd collection to listen in my mp3 player. The problem with Opera cds is that, unlike other music, the whole cd is a unit, one only long track that is artificially split into tracks for convenience of the listener. The problem is that when ripped, these tracks are somehow added a silence at the beginning (or end), which makes the listening very annoying. I was wondering if it would be possible to eliminate all the silences of all the tracks in a batch with audacity. Thanks,

[Gale Andrews]

I love Opera, and I ripped all my cd collection to listen in my mp3 player. The problem with Opera cds is that, unlike other music, the whole cd is a unit, one only long track that is artificially split into tracks for convenience of the listener. The problem is that when ripped, these tracks are somehow added a silence at the beginning (or end), which makes the listening very annoying. I was wondering if it would be possible to eliminate all the silences of all the tracks in a batch with audacity. Thanks,

MP3s always have a short (usually barely detectable) length of silence padding because of a limitation in the format. You will see that silence at the start of an MP3 if you import it into Audacity and zoom in. If the silences are longer than that I would guess your real problem may be that the MP3 player can't play a group of MP3s gaplessly?

If the MP3s contain audible silences you can truncate the silences in Audacity Beta using Effect > Truncate Silence. I would tend to do this manually at least to begin with (import one or more MP3s together, select one track only,Truncate Silence, export that track as MP3) so that you get the silence threshold set correctly and the silence truncated to your satisfaction. Note that Truncate Silence may not work intuitively if you run it on multiple tracks, and that you will lose some quality if you export the track as MP3 because every MP3 encoding throws away quality.

When you know the Truncate Silence parameters that do what you want then you could use the Chains feature to run Truncate Silence on a batch of MP3s.

If you are on Windows, the better solution going forward would be to rip the CDs with CDex - that allows you to rip an entire CD or any selected length of it as one audio file (even if that selected length starts/ends in the middle of a CD track). To do that, right-click over any CD track in the CDex list > "Extract a section of the CD", and choose "Compressed Audio File" as "Output Type". You'll need to check Options > Settings: Directories & Files to see where the MP3 is.



Gale