Cut the silent edges off audio
Recordings start and end with dead air — trim to the first and last sound automatically.
Tools used in this guide
The job
Podcast clips and voice notes carry seconds of silence before 'hello' and after 'goodbye'. Finding the actual first and last loud block beats scrubbing manually.
Threshold and padding
Set the silence threshold in dB (what counts as 'quiet') and padding in ms (how much room to leave around the edges). −40 dB with 100 ms pad is a sane starting point for voice.
Worked example
A 12.4 s voice note with 1.2 s of room tone at the head and 2 s at the tail trims to ~9.2 s at −40 dB. Lower the threshold to −60 dB and room tone starts counting as content.
Where it stops
Only the outer edges are cut — a pause mid-recording stays, by design. Output is uncompressed WAV, so a long stereo file can get big; trim before, or compress after.