Remove Silence cleans up overly long gaps in voiceover, online courses and interviews. The panel offers three thresholds — -50 dB “Strict”, -40 dB “Recommended” and -30 dB “Aggressive” — and lets you set a minimum silence length of 0.1–3 seconds. It is built on ffmpeg's silenceremove: leading silence is cut away entirely, while gaps in the middle and at the end that exceed the setting are not deleted in full but shortened to the pause length you chose.

That makes it less “shave away every silent sample” and more “squeeze the gaps shorter”. The defaults are -40 dB and 0.5 seconds, and the code warns explicitly that -30 dB can mistake breathing and mouth noise for silence.

1. 01Select the audio— pick a voiceover or recording in the left column of the workbench and switch to the “Remove silence” tab.
2. 02Choose a threshold— -50 / -40 / -30 dB; the closer to 0 the more aggressive, and -40 dB is the recommended starting point when you are unsure.
3. 03Set the minimum silence— drag the 0.1–3 second slider; it decides both what counts as long enough to cut and how much natural pause is kept in the middle and at the end.
4. 04Run it and listen— confirm the command, click “Remove silence”, and before downloading listen especially for sentence endings, breaths and quiet words that may have been clipped.

The threshold is a level test

— background noise above it will not count as silence; denoising first usually makes gap removal steadier.

Aggressive mode risk

— -30 dB can take quiet words, breaths, lip noise or trailing sounds for silence and leave sentences sounding abrupt.

Pauses are kept

— middle and end silence is shortened to the minimum length rather than deleted; leading silence is cut away.

Output format

— the source format is re-encoded where possible; formats this build cannot encode, such as WMA and AMR, come out as MP3.

What it does not do

— it does not understand sentences, filler words or repeated content, and it does not remove background noise; use “Audio denoise” for that first.

The audio is processed locally in the browser by ffmpeg.wasm running silenceremove and is never uploaded. The first time you open the workbench, a single-threaded ffmpeg core of about 31–32 MB is downloaded from the site asset domain or jsDelivr.