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Using Audacity to truncate silence | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Zwlth Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 5226 days ago 154 posts - 320 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, French, Persian, Greek | Message 1 of 4 29 July 2011 at 5:01am | IP Logged |
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I'm not sure how well known this is, but I'm posting it in the hopes of being helpful to some who are unware of this ability. Maybe, too, someone else who knows how to do this kind of thing even better than I do will chime in with additional information.
If you find pauses and gaps in your listening materials irritating, then the "truncate silence" effect in Audacity enables you to get rid them automatically. While, for example, an Assimil course may come with a stated 3 hours of recording, after you run it through this feature, you will probably end up with closer to 2 hours of straight, non-stop audio. After playing with this for some time, the best settings I've found are: Min silence duration 200 milliseconds Max silence duration 1000 milliseconds Silence compression 4 :1 Threshold for silence -20dB These settings work perfectly to produce straight audio about 95% of time. Every so often, however, you will find that the final sounds on words get clipped off. In that case, raising the threshold for silence to -25dB or -30dB should do the trick. Don't forget to put it back down to -20dB afterwards, though, because it remembers the settings, and leaving it higher when you don't need it will leave in static that might otherwise come out. Listening to audio this way rather than "as packaged" not only saves time, but also enables me to concentrate upon it and shadow it all the better. May it do the same for you all! 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 4 29 July 2011 at 1:25pm | IP Logged |
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The only problem with that is that the translation exercises get truncated too. That leaves you no time to translate, and as the sentences are disjointed (rather than a continuous monologue/dialogue) they're rubbish as plain listening practice.
Surely it's work taking the extra time to extract only the dialogue...? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| DavidW Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6526 days ago 318 posts - 458 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Italian, Persian, Malay Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, German, Urdu | Message 3 of 4 29 July 2011 at 3:30pm | IP Logged |
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I do this as a matter of course for all the recordings I use. I use Adobe Audition for
other audio editing, but audacity is more straight forward for removing silence. The lack silences between the exercices doesn't bother me, and you can always pause. I also usually combine lessons in 10min files, having 100 files on a portable player can be too fidely. After being spoilt with silence-free audio, I find it really annoying to 'kept waiting' by a recording. :-). Something to try to make it work better: Run a high-pass filter (removing the low frequencies) on the audio at say 80Hz before removing the silences. This won't affect the sound (the first harmonic of a human voice is around 100-200Hz), but will remove some of the big amplitude spikes that throw off the silence-removing algorithm, that works on amplitude. You can find the best threshold level by zooming into the waveform during a silence and examining it. Edited by DavidW on 29 July 2011 at 3:32pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5811 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 4 of 4 31 July 2011 at 5:52pm | IP Logged |
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I've been using this tool for a long time with the same settings, so I can definitely
recommend it as well. Linguaphone courses especially would be unusable without this tool. I look forward to trying your trick, David! Thank you. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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