I can't get Ardour to strip silence without chopping it up unnecessarily

[automaciej (Maciej Bliziński)]

I’m referring to the function described here in the docs: The Ardour Manual - Strip Silence from Audio Regions

I can’t get it work. Maybe someone can point me at what I’m doing wrong. Here’s how to reproduce what I’m doing. Here’s a little script to create a sample audio:

sox -n tmp1.wav synth 0.2 brownnoise gain -12
sox -n tmp2.wav synth 0.8 brownnoise gain -80
sox tmp1.wav tmp2.wav tmp3.wav
for i in $(seq 3 10); do sox tmp${i}.wav tmp${i}.wav tmp$(( i + 1 )).wav; done
mv tmp11.wav tmp_intermittent.wav
sox -n tmp_quiet.wav synth 10 brownnoise gain -80
sox tmp_quiet.wav tmp_intermittent.wav tmp_quiet.wav strip_silence_from_this.wav
rm tmp*.wav

Then we can import strip_silence_from_this.wav into Ardour, then right-click the region, and select strip_silence_from_this → edit → Strip Silence.... A dialog appears. Ardour runs the analysis and shows something that indicates that each pulse should become a separate region. We don’t want that. So we edit the Minimum Length parameter (in samples) and set it to a large number. In 48kHz, 48000 is one second, and the quiet regions are 0.8s long, so putting in number 50000 which is greater than 48000 should result in Ardour only stripping the head and the tail from the region, rather than chopping it up. But Ardour still wants to chop it up, regardless of the number I put in the Minum Length field.

This here shows that each pulse will become a separate region:

Any ideas?

[DHealey]

I don’t have a solution to that problem but I found that tool to be quite slow for large regions so I made my own with a script which you may find useful - https://github.com/davidhealey/ardour-scripts/blob/master/A7/split%20regions.lua

It doesn’t remove the silence, it just splits the items at note onsets.

[automaciej (Maciej Bliziński)]

New finding! Ardour shows the wrong thing in the preview, but then, amazingly, does the right thing when I press “Apply”. The operation is not very fast, but entirely workable. It was the wrong analysis/preview that made me think it’s not working. This still looks like a problem, but it’s a problem with visualization / user interaction rather than the function itself.