Remove silence from a recording

Dead air is the cheapest thing to cut and the most tedious to find. flshy finds every gap in your recording, shows you the list with timecodes and the time it would save, and only then cuts. It runs in the browser, on your own machine, for free.

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How to cut the silence out

Six steps, and the fourth one is where the decision is really made.

  1. Open the editor and bring the recording in

    Go to app.tryflshy.com, make a free account, and drag your recording onto the timeline. A talking-head take, a screen recording or a podcast track all work the same way.

  2. Select the clip and open Remove silent gaps

    Click the clip, open the Audio tab in the inspector, and find the section called Remove silent gaps. It appears on video and audio clips.

  3. Set what counts as silence

    Four sliders decide it: the silence threshold in decibels, the minimum length a gap has to reach, and the padding kept before and after each cut.

    The defaults suit a normal spoken take. A noisy room needs a higher threshold, because the noise floor itself is louder.

  4. Analyse, and read what it proposes

    Analysis only proposes. Nothing on the timeline moves yet. You get the number of silent sections found, the total time they would remove and what percentage of the clip that is, the length the clip would end up, and the first eight gaps listed by timecode.

    If it found nothing, the panel says so and tells you which way to move the sliders instead of leaving you to guess.

  5. Cut

    The button states the whole edit before you press it, in the form Remove 9 silences, saves 12.4s. One press applies it, and it is one entry in the undo history.

  6. Export

    Render to H.264 MP4 on your own hardware, up to 4K, with no watermark and no length limit.

The four controls, and what each one is for

Silence threshold
-80 to -20 dB, default -40 dB. The level below which audio counts as silence. Raise it and more of the clip qualifies, which is what you want when the room itself is noisy.
Minimum duration
0.1 to 2.0 s, default 0.5 s. How much of a quiet stretch has to be left once the padding comes off both ends before it is worth cutting, so at the default padding a gap runs about 0.7 s before it qualifies. This is the control that keeps the natural pauses between sentences from being cut out.
Pad before
0 to 2 s, default 0.1 s. Silence kept at the head of each gap, so the cut does not clip the tail of the word before it.
Pad after
0 to 2 s, default 0.1 s. The same at the other end, so the next word does not start the instant the cut lands.

Cut first, then caption

Silence removal reads the audio level, not the words. It never consults a transcript, so the two padding sliders are the whole defence against a cut that clips the edge of a word. If a cut lands too tight, raise Pad Before and Pad After and run the analysis again.

That makes the order simple: run the silence pass first, then generate captions once the clip is at its final length. Caption cues sit on their own track and are not shifted by the cut, so captioning first means transcribing a cut that has not happened yet and then transcribing it again afterwards.

Questions people actually ask

Does it cut in the middle of a word?

It can. The analysis reads the audio level and never a transcript, so a cut edge can land close to a word. Pad Before and Pad After are the controls that hold the edge clear, both default to 0.1s and go up to 2s, and raising them is the fix when speech sounds clipped.

What does the threshold actually mean?

It is a level in decibels, adjustable from -80 to -20, and -40 is the default. Anything quieter than the threshold for long enough counts as silence, so raising it treats more of the clip as silent.

Can I see what it will cut before it cuts?

Yes, and that is the whole point of the two-step flow. Analysis produces a proposal you can read: how many gaps, how long each one is, where they are, and what the clip would be left at. Nothing moves until you press the cut button.

Can I undo it?

Yes. The cut lands as a single step in the undo history, so one undo puts the clip back.

Is my recording uploaded to a server?

No. The audio is analysed and cut on your own machine, in the browser. Nothing about this feature touches the network.

Is it free?

Yes. No watermark, no credit card, no trial timer and no limit on how many clips you run it on. A free account is needed to open the editor.

From the blog

Silence removalHow to Remove Long Pauses From Podcast VideoWhich pauses to cut from a video podcast and which to keep, what silence removal cannot do, and the threshold, gap and padding settings that work.5 min read

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