Long pauses slow a video down. A talking-head recording, a lecture or a screen demo is full of gaps where nothing is said, and cutting them by hand means scrubbing through the whole clip. This tool does it for you. It listens, finds the quiet stretches, cuts them out and joins what is left.
Better still, you see the gaps before anything is cut. They are marked on the waveform, with the time that will be taken out and the new length. Everything runs in your browser, so the video is never uploaded. Read on to set it up well.
How to remove silence from a video
- Drop a video onto the page. You can add several.
- Set 'Quieter than', the level below which sound counts as silence.
- Set 'Shortest gap to cut' and 'Keep around each cut'.
- Check the gaps marked on the waveform and the numbers in the panel.
- Press Remove silence. Save the new MP4, or download a batch as a zip.
Think of the result as the same video with the dead air taken out. The picture and sound are joined at each cut, so the video gets shorter and nothing else is changed. The tool does not add effects or fades at the joins.
The saved file ends in _tightened. Your original video is not changed.
Give the tool a moment at the start. While it reads the sound, the panel says 'Reading the sound...' and the button waits. That means a run never starts on a guess the page has not shown you.
The three settings that decide what is cut
Cutting silence is easy to do badly. Cut too much and the speaker sounds breathless. Cut too little and nothing changes. Three sliders give you control.
| Setting | Range | What it controls |
|---|---|---|
| Quieter than | -60 dB to -20 dB | How quiet counts as silence. Starts at -40 dB. |
| Shortest gap to cut | 0.2 s to 3 s | Gaps shorter than this are left alone. Starts at 0.6 s. |
| Keep around each cut | None to 0.5 s | How much of the gap is kept at each side. Starts at 0.15 s. |
Quieter than: set the threshold
The slider runs from 'Only true silence' at -60 dB to 'Quiet talk too' at -20 dB. Dashed lines on the waveform show the level you have chosen, so you can see which parts fall below it. If room noise or hiss keeps gaps from being found, raise the level a little. If you start losing soft speech, lower it.
Shortest gap to cut: protect natural pauses
A short pause between sentences is part of speech. A long one is dead air. Set this to the shortest gap you want gone. At 0.6 s, small breaths stay and real pauses go. Raise it to cut less, lower it to tighten the video more.
Keep around each cut: stop words being clipped
Padding keeps a little of the silence at each cut so words do not start or stop suddenly. A small amount, such as the starting 0.15 s, usually sounds natural. With none, cuts can feel abrupt.
Preview the cuts before you save
The gaps that will be cut are hatched on the waveform. The panel adds three numbers: Gaps found, Taking out and New length. They come from the same reading of the sound that the run uses, so they match what the file will get.
- Press play and switch on Skip gaps. The preview jumps over each gap, so you hear the edited result.
- Move the sliders and watch the hatching and the numbers change.
- If the panel finds no gaps, the button says so and waits. Raise the level or shorten the shortest gap.
- If there are very many gaps, only the 100 longest are cut. A note tells you how many shorter ones stay.
In a batch, each file's gaps are found when it runs. The numbers on screen are for the first file. A file with no silence comes back unchanged, with a note.
A good starting recipe
For a clean voice recording, leave the settings where they start: -40 dB, 0.6 s and 0.15 s. For a noisy room, raise the level toward -30 dB so the hiss counts as silence. For a fast, tight edit, lower the shortest gap toward 0.3 s. Change one slider at a time and watch the New length number, so you know which one did what.
What to do afterwards
Once the pauses are gone, you may want to set the level: an audio normaliser works out the amount for you, Change video volume lets you pick it, and increase video volume helps if the voice is still faint. To trim the start or end by hand, use Trim video. To speed the whole clip up, see Change video speed.
Where this tool helps, and where it does not
It works best on speech with a clear difference between talking and quiet. It cuts out the pauses and keeps the rest of the sound; if you want to remove audio from video altogether, mute it instead.
- Lectures, tutorials and screen recordings with long pauses.
- Interviews and talking-head videos with dead air between answers.
- Voice recordings with a steady, low hiss that sits well below the speech.
Try it first on a short, typical stretch of your video. A few minutes of tuning on a sample saves a long run that cuts the wrong things. When the hatched gaps look right and Skip gaps sounds natural, load the full recording with the same settings.
It does not work on a video with no sound, because there has to be sound to listen to. In that case the panel says the video has no sound, so there is no silence to find. Music with soft passages may also be cut where you do not want it, so check the hatching before you save.
The tool runs on your own computer, in current Chrome, Edge or Firefox. Nothing is uploaded, and the server does no video work. There is no account and no watermark, and video tools do not count towards the daily limit for document conversions. Most videos have no size limit, while some, such as certain AVI or WMV files, take longer and can be up to 2 GB.
Tighten your video in a few clicks
To remove silence from a video, drop it in the tool above, set the level, the shortest gap and the padding, and check the hatched gaps on the waveform. Then press Remove silence.
It is free, it needs no account, and your video never leaves your computer, so you can remove silence from video as often as you need.
