AudioKit

Remove silence from audio

Tighten a voice memo, lecture or podcast take by cutting the dead air. The red shading shows every pause that will go, before you commit.

  • Runs on your device
  • No upload
  • No sign-up
  • Free

Open a recording with pauses: a voice memo, lecture, podcast

Stays on this device: nothing is uploaded. You can also drag a file here or paste it.

How silence detection works

The recording is split into 20-millisecond windows and the loudness (RMS level) of each window is measured. A run of windows quieter than your threshold that lasts longer than the shortest pause is marked as silence. Everything else is speech.

Two settings do most of the work. The threshold separates room noise from voice; watch the shading while you drag it and stop when the gaps are covered but no words are. The minimum pause decides how natural it sounds: cut every 0.2 s gap and speech becomes a breathless stream; cut only gaps over 0.6 s and it just sounds well-edited.

Each removed pause is joined with a 5 ms crossfade, so there are no clicks at the joins. For a single mistake, the audio editor’s delete tool is quicker. For a whole lecture you’d rather read, try transcribing it to text.

Questions people ask

How do I remove silence from audio online?

Open the recording above. AudioKit scans it and shades every pause it would cut in red on the waveform. Adjust the threshold and minimum pause length until only the dead air is shaded, preview, and export.

What threshold should I use?

Start at −45 dB. In a quiet room, pauses sit around −60 dB; with a fan or street noise they may be −40 dB or higher, so raise the threshold until the pauses are shaded but words aren’t.

Will it cut the quiet ends of words?

It only cuts stretches that stay below the threshold for longer than the minimum pause, and it leaves a short pause behind (0.2 s by default). Word endings are far shorter than that, so they are kept.

Can I remove silence from the start and end only?

Set the minimum pause to 3 seconds. Only long gaps, typically the lead-in and tail, will be removed. Or use the audio trimmer for exact control.

How do I remove silence in Audacity?

In Audacity, select the track, then use Effect → Special → Truncate Silence and set a threshold and minimum duration. This page does the same job without installing anything, and shows each cut on the waveform before you export.

Can I remove pauses from a video?

This tool works on the audio: open the video and you get the tightened soundtrack as an audio file. Cutting the picture in sync needs a video editor.

Does it work for music?

It works, but music has intentional quiet passages. It’s designed for speech: lectures, voice notes, interviews and podcast raw takes.

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