Remove Silence from Audio
100% private — runs on your device, never uploaded. Works offline once loaded.
Two different problems share one tool. Trimming the ends removes the fumbling at the start of a voice memo and the pause before you reached to stop recording — safe, quick and worth doing to every recording you keep. Removing every gap throughout is the podcast edit: in an unrehearsed recording, pauses are commonly 20–40% of the running time, and cutting them is what makes speech feel edited. Leave a fraction of a second in place of each gap; cutting them to nothing makes speech sound breathless and unnatural. Set the threshold to suit the room — −45 dB is right for most recordings, while a noisy room needs −30 dB before the tool will recognise a pause as silence.
Threshold, duration and the room you recorded in
Two numbers decide every cut. The threshold is how quiet a passage must be to count as silence — and the trap is that a "quiet" room is rarely below −50 dB once you include air conditioning, a computer fan and traffic. If nothing is being cut, the room is noisier than you think; move the threshold up to −30 dB, or clean the noise out first.
The minimum duration stops the tool eating the natural gaps between words. Set it to a second or more and only real pauses are removed. Below about half a second you are cutting the rhythm of speech itself, and the result sounds clipped and breathless.
Why to leave a little silence behind
Removing pauses entirely produces a voice that never breathes — technically tighter and much harder to listen to. Leaving a quarter of a second in place of each gap keeps the cadence of speech while still cutting most of the dead time. It is the setting that makes an edit sound edited rather than compressed.
Frequently asked questions
How much time will this save?
In unrehearsed speech, pauses are commonly 20–40% of the running time. Cutting them typically takes an hour of raw recording down to around 40–48 minutes.
Can I use this on music?
Only for trimming the silence at the start and end. Cutting every quiet passage out of music removes the rests, which are part of the piece.
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