Audition and Audacity both remove silence, both do it well, and both hide the feature somewhere you would not guess. They also share one habit that catches people out, which is worth knowing before you run either across something you care about.
Adobe AuditionDelete Silence in the Diagnostics panel
Audition keeps this away from the effects, because it scans first and shows you a list of what it found before it changes anything.
- Open the file in the Waveform editor. This does not work in the Multitrack view.
- Open the Window menu and choose Diagnostics.
- In the Effect list at the top of the panel, choose Delete Silence.
- Set what counts as silence and what counts as audio, using the two level and duration pairs.
- Click Scan. Audition lists every stretch it found without touching the file yet.
- Review the list, then click Delete All to apply it.
The two definitions are what make this one precise. Silence is described as a signal below a level for longer than a duration, and audio as a signal above a level for longer than a duration. The second definition is the one that stops a single click or a bit of noise from counting as the performance starting again.
AudacityTruncate Silence
Audacity puts this in the Effect menu, grouped under Special in recent versions.
- Open the file and select the audio, or select nothing to process all of it.
- Open the Effect menu, then Special, then Truncate Silence.
- Set Threshold, which is the level below which audio counts as silence.
- Set Duration, which is the shortest stretch of silence it will act on.
- Choose whether to truncate detected silence to a fixed length or compress it by a ratio.
- Preview, then apply.
The same settings, different names
| What it controls | Audition | Audacity |
|---|---|---|
| The level that counts as silence | Silence is defined as, signal below | Threshold |
| How long before it acts | for more than (ms) | Duration |
| What counts as the audio returning | Audio is defined as, signal above | not exposed |
| What happens to the gap | removed entirely | Truncate to, or Compress to |
The habit they share
Both of these work across the whole file. They are built for spoken word, where the goal is to tighten every pause in a recording, and they are excellent at that.
It means that if what you actually wanted was to shorten the dead air at the end, you should check the middle of the result too. A track with a deliberate breakdown, a spoken intro with a pause for effect, or an ambient passage will all come back tightened along with the ending.
Doing this to a folder
Audacity can batch through Tools, then Macros, adding Truncate Silence and an Export step and running it across a folder. Audition can batch through saving your settings as a Favorite and running Batch Process. Both work, and both run unattended, which means the first time you hear the results is after all of them are done.
CutTheBullshitBrooo was built for that specific case. You drop in stems, exports or whole folders, it targets the useless silence at the end of each file, and you get a waveform preview of every cut before anything happens. Threshold, safe time and fade are the three controls, so reverb tails and fades survive. Originals stay untouched, and clean copies export separately.
It also works out which instrument each file is, tags it in its own color across 14 categories, and can rename the whole batch on the same pass.