About this tool
Silence removal detects intervals below a chosen dB threshold for at least a selected duration and deletes them. It can shorten meeting pauses and voice memos, but room noise, quiet word endings, and natural breaths may sit near the same level as silence.
A higher threshold or shorter minimum duration removes more aggressively. The timeline changes, so subtitles, chapters, and external timecodes no longer align, and conversational rhythm may become unnatural. Begin conservatively.
How to use it
Listen to noise and quiet speech
Estimate the level difference between room tone and the softest meaningful words.
Set threshold and duration
Start with a lower threshold and longer duration to remove only obvious pauses.
Review every join
Check word endings, breaths, and sentence rhythm, reducing sensitivity when needed.
Supported range and limits
- Detection rule
- A stretch is cut when its level stays below the threshold for longer than the minimum duration
- Effect of the threshold
- Too high and you lose breaths and note tails; too low and nothing is removed. Recordings with room noise need it raised
- What stays the same
- Volume, pitch and order of the kept passages are untouched; only the gaps go
- Output
- MP3, re-encoded after trimming, so one lossy generation is added
- Poor candidates
- Recordings with continuous background music or room tone, where there is no true silence to detect
- Where it runs
- FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly in your browser; the file is never uploaded
When you would use it
Shortening a meeting recording
Remove extended waiting or no-speaker intervals to reduce review time.
Cleaning a voice note
Delete long silence before, after, and between thoughts while retaining the spoken content.
Tightening up dictation
A dictated draft full of thinking pauses can lose twenty or thirty percent of its length once the gaps go, and listens far better for it.
What to know before you start
- High background noise can prevent silence detection; denoising and silence removal are separate operations.
- Aggressive settings cut soft speech, word endings, and musical rests, so inspect the complete file.
- Every later timestamp shifts after deletion, requiring external annotations to be regenerated.
Related concepts
- threshold dB
- The level boundary below which a segment may be treated as silence.
- minimum duration
- How long the signal must stay below the boundary before deletion.