Speech workflows
Shorten pauses without rushing speech
Analyze silence, choose how much to retain, and verify the pacing after an edit.
On this page
Work on a representative passage
Select a section with a few sentence breaks and one longer pause and open Process → Truncate Silence…. Set the threshold below the quietest words you want to keep and choose the minimum pause length to detect.
Every channel must stay below the threshold. On a stereo recording, noise on one side can stop a pause from being detected.
Try a fixed-duration example
Suppose the selection includes a two-second pause. Choose Truncate to a fixed duration and retain 0.5 seconds, with a minimum silence duration shorter than that pause. If the whole pause meets the threshold, it becomes 0.5 seconds and the selection shortens by 1.5 seconds.
Press Analyze to see the predicted change before applying. Choose Compress excess silence instead when different pause lengths should keep some of their variation.
Listen across sentence boundaries
Apply and listen through each transition. Undo if breaths or quiet syllables are cut, adjust the threshold or minimum duration, and try again. Once the treatment sounds natural, apply the same settings to a wider selection with Repeat Last Effect.
This effect removes time and remaps transcript and selection timing. If you want quieter gaps at the same pace, use the Noise Gate instead.