Batch Trim Silence From MP3s

So I have literally thousands of mp3 and audio files from record companies and musicians to manage every year as part of my work for Party Vibe Radio. And a big part of that work revolves around making these files suitable for airplay. An aspect of which is removing any leading and trailing silence from each and every file because our streaming source software doesn’t support gap detection unfortunately. Now this is hugely time consuming job which I’ve done manually for several years because despite researching the question I’ve always failed to find a suitable means that met my requirements. Until today so here’s how to automatically remove any leading or trailing silence from any audio file using Goldwave’s ‘Batch Processing’ ability.

Select: File > Batch Processing > Add Files

and add any files you want to remove silence from.

Select: Add Effect > Goldwave* > Auto Trim > Add

Now after some testing I found the default values weren’t quire what I wanted so I did some testing and came up with the following values, although you should run your own tests of course…

Select: Auto Trim > Add Edit > Auto Trim

and either edit or move the sliders to…

Silence to keep (s): 0.048
Thresholds db (s): -40db

… select whether you want to remove leading, trailing or both kinds of silence.

Save the preset if necessary.

Browse to the destination tab in order to choose how to save your edits.

Finally hit Begin when you’re ready to go…

Some background information on Goldwave.

“20! Version 1.0 was released 20 years ago today. Sincere thanks to all the customers that helped make GoldWave a success. Early customers have enjoyed free upgrades for 2 decades!

GoldWave is a highly rated, professional digital audio editor. It’s fully loaded to do everything from the simplest recording and editing to the most sophisticated audio processing, restoration, enhancements, and conversions. It is easy to learn and use, so get started now by downloading the fully functional evaluation version!”

About Goldwave’s Batch Processing ability:

“Process an unlimited number of files in many different formats. Use Batch Processing to process and convert your complete library of songs: match volume levels of different songs, boost the bass, trim leading and trailing silences, convert to MP3, and much more. Supports iTunes Plus, m4a, wav, wma, mp3, ogg, aiff, au, vox, FLAC, and even raw binary data. Entire folders and subfolders can be processed with just a few clicks and the entire hierarchy preserved. Advanced users can take advantage of the power and flexibility of command line processing.”

GoldWave – Audio Editor, Recorder, Converter, Restoration, & Analysis Software

Some alternative software I tried which also claims to be able to remove silence from MP3s and audio files.

1. mpTrim – (Windows)

Although this software appeared promising at first because of it’s ease of use and batch processing abilities. This package appears to be limited to just three settings for controlling the level silence to remove: accurate (default) (fast), aggressive and very aggresive; none of which were accurate enough for my needs unfortunately.

mpTrim’s blurb.

What exactly can mpTrim do for you?

mpTrim can trim MP3s – removing silent or unwanted parts.
mpTrim can adjust the volume of MP3s. Volume change can be manual or automatic (volume normalization).
mpTrim can fade-in/out MP3s (to fix abrupt beginning/ending).
mpTrim can clean-up MP3s and recover wasted disk space.
mpTrim keeps the music quality intact, no matter how many times you process an MP3, because it works directly in the MP3 format without having to decode/re-encode. That also makes it very fast.

2. dBpoweramp Music Converter (dMC) – (Windows)

dBpoweramp Music Converter seems to need to decode and re-encode the files you want to edit which is too time consuming for my needs. I also didn’t find it very user friendly.

About dBpoweramp Music Converter.

Audio conversion perfected, effortlessly convert to mp3, FLAC, Apple lossless and more. dBpoweramp Music Converter™ has become the standard tool for audio conversions, over 30 million users world trust their converting to dBpoweramp

3. mp3splt – (Linux)

Finally I also tested mp3splt although I was put off by it’s apparent need to split files rather than simply deleting the silence from them. I also have a strong preference for manipulating and editing this kind of file in a graphical environment and I only run Linux as a server.

mp3splt’s description.

mp3splt is a free command-line utility that allows you to split mp3, ogg vorbis and native flac files from several splitpoints, without need of decoding and reencoding. It is useful to split large mp3, ogg vorbis and native flac to make smaller files or to split entire albums to obtain original tracks.