Find the quiet stretches in a recording and cut them out automatically — or just trim the silence off the front and back.
Each remaining piece is joined with a short blend, so the edits do not click. Raise the threshold if quiet speech is being cut; lower it if background noise is stopping anything being found.
Remove Silence finds the stretches where nothing is happening and takes them out, so a recording full of pauses becomes one that holds attention.
Three settings control it. The threshold is how quiet a moment has to be before it counts as silence — background hiss means true digital silence is rare, so this is usually somewhere between −50 and −35 decibels. The minimum length stops natural pauses between words from being swallowed. The breath setting leaves a fraction of a second of the original quiet at each edge, which is what keeps the result sounding human rather than clipped.
The count of silent stretches updates as you drag, before you commit to anything, so you can see whether the settings are finding too much or too little. Choose Start & end only when the recording itself is fine and you just want the dead air before someone started talking removed.
Almost certainly background noise. Room hum or hiss keeps the level above the threshold even when nobody is talking. Drag the threshold up towards −30 dB and it will start finding gaps.
The threshold is too high, so quiet speech is being treated as silence. Lower it a few decibels, and raise the minimum gap length so only real pauses qualify.
Each remaining piece is joined with a short blend, so there are no clicks. Whether the edit is noticeable depends on the breath setting — around 0.1 seconds usually sounds natural, zero sounds abrupt.
No. This removes silent time, not noise. The hiss under the speech is untouched — noise reduction is a different job that needs much heavier processing.
Entirely down to the recording. A tidy read might lose a few seconds; a rambling interview with long pauses can lose a quarter of its length. The result line tells you exactly what was removed.