Remove Silence
Find the silent stretches in a recording and cut them out. Tune how quiet counts as silence and how long a gap has to be before it is removed.
The conversion engine (about 32 MB) loads once on your first run and starts instantly from cache afterwards.
What the two settings do
The threshold sets how quiet audio has to be before it counts as silence. −50 dB is the default and works for a quiet room; noisy recordings with air conditioning may need −40 dB or −35 dB. The minimum silence length protects short natural pauses: at 0.5 seconds, only stretches of at least half a second are removed.
If the result is not right
Silence still there? Raise the threshold towards −40 dB. Losing wanted audio? Lower it to −55 dB or −60 dB. If speech comes out choppy, raise the minimum silence to about one second so sentence breaks survive.
Typical uses
Shortening lecture and meeting recordings, tightening long pauses left by voice-over retakes, and cleaning silence off the head and tail of a voice memo. Leading and trailing silence are handled in the same pass.
Frequently asked questions
How much shorter will the file be?
It depends on the source. A steady read might lose ten percent; a meeting with long silences can lose thirty or forty. Always listen to the result before using it.
Does this remove background noise?
No. It shortens silent stretches; it is not a noise reducer. On noisy recordings the threshold has to sit above the noise floor for anything to be detected.
I only want to cut the silence at the start.
For that, the audio trimmer with an explicit start time is more predictable. This page processes silence throughout the file.