TIL: Trimming Silence From Audio Files With SoX

Audio recordings always have silence at the start and end. SoX removes it in one line.

sox input.wav output.wav silence -l 1 0.1 1% -l 1 0.1 1%

The silence effect detects and removes silent sections. The parameters set how much silence triggers a cut.

sox input.wav output.wav silence -l 1 0.3 5% -l 1 0.3 5%

Increase the thresholds to avoid cutting off quiet speech.

sox input.wav output.wav reverse silence -l 1 0.1 1% reverse

The reverse trick trims trailing silence. Reverse, trim what is now the start, reverse back.

Is SoX on macOS?

brew install sox

Batch processing?

Use find -exec or a for loop across a directory of files.