Remove silences from your audio recordings

Last updated on May 12, 2021

Learn how to use Strip Silence in Adobe Audition to automatically remove silent sections and tighten your audio.

Strip Silence lets you identify and remove silent or inactive regions from recorded clips without losing synchronization in multitrack audio. Use this feature to clean up voice recordings and interviews, and to prepare multitrack edits, such as podcasts or audio documentaries. Strip Silence parameters can be adjusted for specific scenarios, such as noisy backgrounds or varying volume levels among participants, to easily identify and remove regions of the track with no content, saving editors time. 

Apply Strip Silence to a track and edit the settings

Before you start, make sure to be in Multitrack mode. Select Effects > Diagnostics > Deleting Silence (process). The Diagnostics panel opens on the left side of the UI.

From the Preset dropdown, select from the standard options or set the preset for your audio.

Presets dropdown
Presets dropdown

To scan for problems in your audio track using the Deleting Silence effect, click the Scan button. To find the right levels for silence and audio in your recordings - like it used to do in waveform view, click Find Level.

Below the Find Level button, you get a list of different regions that it thinks are silence in recordings along with the Start time, Duration, and Clip details.

Detected clips
Detected clips

Once the issues are detected, you can fix them using one of the two options:

  • Strip Silence - Cut and delete the silence entirely.
  • Split Silence - Cut the clip but leave them selected so that you can verify if the right part has been selected.
Select to Strip or split the silence
Select to Strip or split the silence

Strip Silence is better suited to podcast interviews or audio where silences are well-defined. For more complex audios with fewer silences and voice modulations, you may go for Split Silence.

If you have multiple audio tracks and you want to apply these settings to all, select Split Scene > Split All. In the list of clips, the Split Silence only works on the selected clip. If all the clips are selected or none of them are selected, it gets applied to all the clips.

The waveform shows the silence and noise in the audio. The brighter once are what it considers noise and the darker ones with waveforms are considered silence. Drag the brighter parts down to empty tracks to confirm if the selections are correct.

Waveforms with sections selected for splitting
Waveforms with sections selected for splitting

Edit effect parameters

Based on your audio, the Deleting Silence effect auto detects the best decibel and time settings.
You can still set the threshold manually if your workflow demands. 

Edit Effect parameters
Edit Effect parameters

To open/close the effect parameters, click the Settings button next to Scan. Adjust settings for the following:

  • Define Silence As: This feature detects silences based on the threshold. Anything that is below the threshold is categorized as silence. Drag the Signal is below slider to set the decibel manually in dB, and drag the For more than slider to set the time in ms.
  • Define Audio As: This feature detects silences based on the threshold. Anything that is below the threshold is categorized as audio. Drag the Signal is below slider to set the decibel manually in dB, and drag the For more than slider to set the time in ms.