So I’ve been using Ardour for over a year recording and editing a podcast. So far I’ve just manually removed silences. However I started looking into the remove silence tool last week. It seems to operate independently on regions though. Is there a way to automatically remove silence across multiple tracks only if all tracks are below the threshold?
If not natively in Ardour can you recommend any workarounds? I did some searching around the forums but couldn’t find anything quite like this so I do apologize if I just missed it.
What exactly do you mean by “remove” silence? Are you wanting to cut out silent sections? Or do you mean you want to truly silence sections where there is no talking by reducing the volume?
@ayelinux has the best solution. Fader automation would be another option to look into. Create a submix bus of the tracks you want to do this to, and then write the fader automation track to that bus.
The former, I would like to cutout the “silent” sections not just reduce their volume to zero.
I’ve been using a two step process. Namely using a noise gate during editing in Ardour then using the Truncate Silences function of Audacity on the final output. However it’s difficult to get a feel for pacing like that.
I’ve tried recording in Ardour, using stem export to get individual tracks, truncating silence in Audacity, then importing into a new project with mixed results.
Audacity’s truncate silences function takes any portion where all tracks are below a certain threshold and cuts the silent portion down to a set length, I usually use 0.75 seconds. By default it performs this on all tracks not just on individual tracks.
I was just wondering if Ardour has a similar function that I’m just not finding, it would make my editing tool chain much less cumbersome.
There is a remove silence function in Ardour yes. It can be tuned a bit based on threshold etc. I typically use it in slide mode, and in this mode it will just delete silent portions of regions, but leave the gap in between regions. I have never used it ripple mode for instance and don’t know how it might act in that mode, but I suppose in that mode it might automatically close the gap, not sure.
Bah sorry I glanced at the replies and not the OP, who knows about that tool. Sorry about that, laziness on my part.
I do not believe there is a way to get the tool to operate outside of the scope of a single region at this time. If you are doing this in audacity anyways you could just do the same thing except using Ardour so it is a bit easier to move around to adjust pacing using this tool.
This could probably be achieved using a lua script that leverages a VAMP plugin. I made a script that detects note onsets and splits up multiple regions, it might be a good start for a remove silence script.