Removing silent spaces [SOLVED]

[SAngeli]

Hi,
I am working on a project where I extracted the audio track from a video and am manipulating this long audio track.
As I have several songs I decided to simply divide this long track in several pieces; this for easy editing. I obviously separated each track for my editing convenience.
Now that I am done, I wish to reconnect all together but noticed that I have several empty and silent spaces between audio sections.
I wish to let Audacity automatically eliminate all those silent spaces so that when this action is done you will not notice that the entire audio track has been split into pieces.
So far I am doing this manually but it might not be precise.
I am aware of the truncate tool but I do not know how to tell Audacity to remove only spaced where there is 0 dB meaning no audio.

Any suggestion is welcomed.
Thank you

[DVDdoug]

Try the Truncate Silence effect. You can reduce the Truncate To time to zero if you wish.

...you will not notice that the entire audio track has been split into pieces.

A crossfade (a fade-out and fade-in with overlap) often makes a smoother "splice". The crossfade can be as short as a few milliseconds or a couple of seconds depending on what sounds best or what sounds more natural. But, this is a manual operation often requiring listening and trial-and-error.

[SAngeli]

Hi,
I wish to know what settings should I use in order to remove totally and only silent spaces Audacity placed when I split parts of the entire track? I want Audacity to do so and not me doing it manually; thin in order not to live potential silent spaces. Do I just accept default settings or what?
In my case I only need to remove the silent spaces without fading as I need to have a continuation between them in order to have an entire track.
Thank you

[steve]

To totally remove silences, you need to truncate silences to zero length.
See: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tr ... lence.html

[SAngeli]

Hi,

...you need to truncate silences to zero length.

Truncate silence windows options are:
- Truncate detected silence
Detect Silence
- Level
- Duration
Truncate to

I need to remove all silence in any kind of lengh of silence that is presence in the track. It is the same silence I can add in Audacity myself.

Please, if possilbe, can you provide me values for the fields below reported?
Detect Silence
- Level ___ dB
- Duration ___seconds
Truncate to ___seconds

Thank you

[steve]

I need to remove any kind of silence in any kind of lengh of silence that is presence in the track that Audacity created when I split sections of a track and live empty space between them. Same as if I would introduce silence myself.

Sorry but your meaning is not clear.
"Splitting" a track does not create silence.

Please describe what you mean by "when I split sections of a track and live empty space between them".

[SAngeli]

Hi,
I just edited my previous post and added a screenshot.
I agree with you: splitting a track does not create silence.
I know know where the silence came from. At the end of my work, I merged two tracks and this caused silence to be created.
Now, either I can merge without having Audacity create silence but leave them in split mode (please tell me how to do so), or I need to remove all the silence that was created by Audacity when I merged those two tracks.
Attached is how it was before merging.

Please adivese.
Thank you

[SAngeli]

... is it possible to find out the dB of something, most important a silente space? I ask this because if I wish to Truncate something I have to set up a dB level but if I do not know what is the dB level of what I wish to delete/truncate I do not know what value to set in Truncate Silece window setting.

Thank you

[steve]

In real world audio, absolute silence hardly ever occurs. What we call "silence" is usually just very very quiet audio.
Anything below about -70 dB (minus 70) is virtually "silence".
In Audacity, absolute silence can occur. "Gaps" as shown in your screenshot are absolutely silence, and we can generate absolute silence.
Absolute silence is "-infinity dB" (minus infinity).

The quietest that Truncate Silence" goes down to is -80 dB, which is very very quiet, so that will catch (and thus truncate) sounds below -80 dB, including absolute silence.
You only want to truncate the very quietest parts (ideally only "absolute" silence), so you need to tell Truncate Silence to Detect silence that is very very very quiet. So to do that, set the detection "Level (dB)" to the minimum (-80 dB).

The Detection "Duration" needs to be a bit smaller than the shortest silence that you want to remove. Looking at your screenshot, all of the "gaps" seem to be more than a minute long, so almost any setting less than 60 seconds will do. I'd suggest that you try it set at 10 seconds.

[SAngeli]

Hi,
I wish to thank you for your time and explanations. I was able to fully remove silent spaces.

I did I set the Detection "Duration" to -80 dB, Duration to 10 seconds and Truncate to set to Zero
This way it removed entirely all existing silent space without affecting existing recording.

Thanks a lot!