Do the work of several hours in a minute… meet Strip Silence

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Andre, cutting big audio files, cutting big files, cutting drums, cutting voice, grid, pro tools, production diary, strip silence

Hi guys it’s me, Andre.

Since 15 weeks, I’m now a volunteer at the Benztown studios in Stuttgart and learning from Andy & Oli.

This week, I’m showing you a useful feature for cutting very long files in a few seconds… Strip Silence.

Strip Silences cuts out all the gaps of audio under a certain threshold, you can determine yourself. It’s useful for long voice tracks, which don’t have to be cutted very fine or for any other long track with big gaps. And the best, it’s non-destructive.

On the picture you can see four slider controls.

Strip Threshold determines how quiet a certain audio has to be cutted away by Strip Silence
Min Strip Duration determines the shortest amount of silence, which is worth to be cut (set it on a higher level, if you want to cut whole sentences by your VO and not you single words)
Region Start Pad & Region End Pad adds a little bit of space to the start and the end of the new regions, so you don’t have to fear cutted of starts or cutted delays. It’s a kind of ‘safety zone’

The Rename Button allows you to rename the new audio files.

Select a region or regions, you want to use Strip Silence on (in my case it’s a vocal track) and press Command + U (Mac) or Ctrl + U (Windows) to open the Strip Silence window.

Increase the Strip Threshold to avoid cutting away audio, you need.

With Region Start and Region End Pad, you can avoid chopping between your audio, which makes it sound unnatural.

If you want, you can rename your files, if not just click “Strip”. Strip Silence is doing the rest.

That’s pretty it. No big magic, but very powerful.

Here’s a good example for intelligent use of Strip Silence:

You’ve got a drum track, which is not played in an exact grid. Just use Strip Silence to cut all the elements of your drum track into several small selections, which all have only the sound you need and no gaps. With all that several files it’s no big problem to arrange them into your grid.

Sometimes, easy features are more powerful than most people think.

See you next week.

Cheers

Andre