Silence Detection: Tighten Speech Audio Automatically

Spoken content often contains natural pauses, hesitations, and dead air. Silence removal detects these gaps and cuts them out, making your video feel faster and more polished. The feature works best on talking-head clips, voiceovers, and interview footage where tighter pacing improves viewer retention.

How to Remove Silences

1

Select a speech clip

Tap the clip on the timeline to select it. This works best on clips that contain spoken audio.

2

Open Remove Silences

Tap the silence removal option in the clip toolbar. A settings sheet appears with controls for tuning the detection.

3

Adjust settings and apply

Review the detected silences and fine-tune the parameters (see below). Tap Apply to split the clip and remove the silent portions.

Settings Explained

  • Sensitivity — how aggressively silences are detected. Higher sensitivity catches shorter pauses; lower sensitivity only removes longer, obvious gaps.
  • Minimum silence duration — pauses shorter than this threshold are kept. Useful for preserving natural breathing pauses that make speech sound human.
  • Tail padding — a small buffer of audio kept at the end of each speech segment before the cut. Prevents words from sounding clipped. Adjustable from 0.05 to 0.5 seconds.
Start conservative: Begin with lower sensitivity and increase it gradually. Removing too many pauses can make speech sound unnatural and rushed.

What Happens After

The original clip is split into multiple shorter clips, one for each speech segment. The silent gaps between them are removed, and the remaining clips sit back-to-back on the timeline. Since trimming is non-destructive, you can undo the operation or manually extend individual clips to restore pauses.