Effects and analysis
Silence audio and shorten pauses
Understand the difference between muting, inserting quiet time, and removing excess silence.
Choose what should happen to time
Process → Silence Audio (Cmd/Ctrl+L) makes the target silent without changing its length. Generate → Silence… inserts quiet time at the cursor or replaces a selected span. Process → Truncate Silence… removes time from long pauses.
Analyze long pauses
In Truncate Silence, set a threshold in dB and a minimum silence duration; the defaults are −40 dB and 0.5 seconds. Every channel must stay below the threshold for at least that long. Detection includes region gain and fades and continues across adjoining regions.
Choose Truncate to a fixed duration to leave each pause at a set length, or Compress excess silence to keep the minimum plus a percentage of the excess. Click Analyze to see how many pauses will shorten and how much time is removed before you apply.
Keep a natural pace
Use a conservative threshold so quiet speech is not treated as silence, and listen to breaths and sentence boundaries afterwards. The effect remaps transcript, cursor, and selection timing and supports cancellation, undo, and Repeat Last Effect, which detects pauses afresh in the new selection.
A noise gate changes quiet levels but keeps time. Truncate Silence changes pacing. Choose based on whether the recording needs cleaner pauses or shorter ones.