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Topic: Software to facilitate chopping audio files whose end contains silence (Read 1777 times) previous topic - next topic
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Software to facilitate chopping audio files whose end contains silence

Been a long time since I've posted here. Heh. First time in a long time though I have had a tough to solve problem and HA seemed to be the best place to ask with the experts here.

The topic title kinda explains it and kinda doesn't. Need to really explain it a bit better: I have a large library I am working on for a project ready to go live in a few months. A sizable chunk of this library has some spoken word comments at the end of every song separated by a good bit of silence. I want to get rid of this. Unfortunately it is hard to get a good idea merely by filenames and tags what files will have this content. So essentially I would have to search by the content itself.

Possible workable solutions I have in my head:
-- (Obviously) Software that can see the chunk of silence and delete that and everything beyond it
-- Software that can give me an overall view of waveforms in the whole library that I can skim over and have a solid idea of which files I need to edit by a quick glance
-- Software that can calculate total length of silence in a file in a sortable list (although this is harder to be 100% sure what is what)

Or if anyone has any other workable solutions in mind, that'd be awesome as well. I do have a handful of applications at my disposal to work with this library including Adobe Audition, Audacity, and mp3DirectCut (Haven't actually used it yet, but downloaded it for this purpose in which it claims to be able to cut out parts of an mp3 file without any re-encoding so it retains overall quality)

Thanks!

Software to facilitate chopping audio files whose end contains silence

Reply #1 –
I have not tried this, but Audacity has a couple of tools that might help:
Edit -> Detach At Silence  (I'm not sure what this does.  It shows the silence (flat-line) replaced by a blank space...  I don't know what a "blank space" is...  It doesn't look like it creates a separate file...)

Analyze -> Silence Finder

Quote
...and mp3DirectCut (Haven't actually used it yet, but downloaded it for this purpose in which it claims to be able to cut out parts of an mp3 file without any re-encoding so it retains overall quality)
Yes.  There are a few special-purpose MP3 editors that can do some simple-limited editing without decoding.  This avoids the additional lossy-encode step, and the programs can work faster since they are working on smaller files and they don't have to take the time to de-code/re-code.

All "regular" audio editors work on uncompressed PCM (WAV-like) data, so compressed files have to be de-compressed for editing.  The additional "damage" comes if/when you re-compress.  You don't always hear the quality loss, and you can minimize the additional loss by using a higher bitrate when you re-save the file.

One option might be to use a regular audio editor to find the parts you want to edit, and then use the special MP3 editor to make the edits.

Software to facilitate chopping audio files whose end contains silence

Reply #2 –
Welcome back! If you have the original lossless audio (not mp3) and if the silence you want to trim is "digital silence" (all zeros), then shntool's 'trim' function will do the trick. But if the silence is actually very quiet noise, a wave editor with "silence detection" is probably required. If you only have MP3s, I suggest mpTrim, which is free and has silence detection and nice previewing features, but you have to pay for the pro version if you want to use it on more than one file at a time. mp3DirectCut also has "pause detection" and trimming features which are not as easy to use, but may be more flexible and batch-mode friendly. Naturally, there may be some trial and error involved, so make backups of whatever you're working on

Software to facilitate chopping audio files whose end contains silence

Reply #3 –
mp3splt.

Software to facilitate chopping audio files whose end contains silence

Reply #4 –
Thanks guys! I did start playing around with some of the mentioned programs including mp3DirectCut and actually found the latter had half of the problem taken care of. It has a batch mode with 'Pause Detection' and upon testing it on an album I have previously confirmed had the aforementioned silence and commentary, it handled it flawlessly. Each file that had a sufficient amount of a pause it trimmed that out and separated the commentary into a separate file. Though I still have to find a way to easily track down which files in this library have this commentary on the end. But that is pretty much all that is left. Either that or manually go through and check them out one by one.