Comments on: The SoX of Silence

By: jason

jason — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:33:26 +0000

My suggestion would be just to pad the output file with some silence after you’re done trimming it out. It adds an extra step, but if you can batch it out it shouldn’t matter much…
sox infile.wav outfile.wav pad 0.1

By: Gerry

Gerry — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:23:42 +0000

Thanks for posting these notes – sox is a great tool.
A question if I may… Is there a simple way to trim all silence except for say 100ms from the start of a file?

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:28:49 +0000

Good Job. Thanks for taking time to write and share this doc.

By: jason

jason — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:50:11 +0000

Good point! Thanks for the tip!

By: DickN

DickN — Tue, 17 May 2011 02:04:27 +0000

That’s exactly the information I’ve been looking for. I’m a new SOX user and I have piles of sound files I’m converting to another format. Some of them have clicks at the beginning and some have long tails of dead air. This fixes both, so I can process the whole library in one batch.

You don’t need the temp file. SOX allows multiple effects to be listed and will execute them serially. Thus,

sox in.wav out.wav silence 1 0.1 1% reverse silence 1 0.1 1% reverse

is legal and works just like your example. I added ‘norm’ before the first ‘silence’. It’s also a good idea to add ‘–no-clobber’ before the input file name, especially if you’re running this from a batch process.

By: jason

jason — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:26:34 +0000

sox in.wav out.wav silence 1 0.5 1% 1 5.0 1% : newfile : restart
is the way to split audio using SoX. I’ve added it as an example in the article.

By: Lasky

Lasky — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:49:54 +0000

Thanks a lot for excellent explanation of that sox’s effect. Very useful.

I did think about use the silence effect to split one huge file into set of files. The cut point would be a period of silence longer then some parameter (i.e. 5 s).

Do you think it is possible using sox??

Poul

By: Matt Mascarenhas

Matt Mascarenhas — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 22:20:31 +0000

Thanks very much for this, jason. I took your batch file and made the following bash script:

#!/bin/bash

for f in *.wav
do
sox "$f" "temp.wav" silence 1 0.1 1% reverse
sox "temp.wav" "$f" silence 1 0.1 1% reverse
done

which simply trims the silence off both ends of all .wav files in the "$PWD".

By: jason

jason — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:38:52 +0000

I believe you’ll set the recording device using the Windows mixer and then

sox -d recfile.wav

And it should just work…

By: riaz

riaz — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:50:50 +0000

HI i wanted to know how to set recording device to mic (rear panel) i have realtek soound card.

I tried -t waveaudio “Mic”
but it did not detect the device and returned error. I could try “High Definition Audio” but all recording devices including mic and stereo output have this description. So how would you do it.

If anyone who is good at using rec (or sox) please can i have your email or msn?