Silence Finder and Sound Finder

From Audacity Manual

Jump to: navigation, search


Silence Finder and Sound Finder are two related tools which can useful to label the different songs or sections in a long recording, such as the tracks from an LP or cassette. After typing the name of the track or section in each label, File > Export Multiple... will export audio files in one process corresponding to each label's audio. See Splitting a recording into separate tracks.

Silence Finder - Setting Parameters has more help on adjusting the Silence Finder slider settings.

Silence Finder...

Accessed by: Analyze > Silence Finder...
Silence Finder dialog

Silence Finder divides up a track by placing point labels inside areas of silence. Use this if you just want to split the recording into tracks at a specific point without removing the silences between them.

If labels are produced in the middle of tracks, increase the silence level and duration. If some tracks don't have a label between them, reduce the silence level and duration. See Setting Parameters for more help choosing values to place the labels correctly.


Sound Finder...

Accessed by: Analyze > Sound Finder...
Sound Finder dialog

Sound Finder divides up a track by placing region labels for areas of sound that are separated by silence. Use this to make the labels show the exact region of each track to be exported. This lets you remove some or all of the silence between the tracks.

If any tracks have more than one label, increase the silence level and duration. If any labels extend into other tracks, reduce the silence level and duration.

Examples

Here is a stereo track with six songs. The entire project is selected prior to using the Analyze functions.

Silence-Sound Finder six songs.png

Example with Silence Finder

After running Analyze > Silence Finder... we can see that Audacity has identified the six songs, placing an "S" label just before the beginning of each song plus a seventh label at the end (as the final track ends in silence).

Silence Finder six songs shown.png

Example with Sound Finder

If instead we run Analyze > Sound Finder... on the same selected audio we can see that Audacity has again identified the six songs giving them numerical labels. The labels exclude a small amount of the gaps between the songs (seen most clearly between labels 5 and 6) so the lead-in and lead-out for each song would be shorter.

Sound Finder six songs shown.png

Links

|< Index of Effects, Generators and Analyzers

|< Analyze Menu

Views
Useful External Links