Comments on: The SoX of Silence

By: Jason Navarrete

Jason Navarrete — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:49:59 +0000

Don’t think you can extract the silence using sox, at least I’m not aware of how to do it. I think you’d need some sort of specialized audio analysis utility to do that. Good luck though!

By: capsula4

capsula4 — Wed, 09 May 2012 21:54:02 +0000

I know this may sound pointless, but theres a way to actually keep the silence files? By this, I think I would be able to create a “noise” profile and then clean the audio.

What I’m actually doing for getting a possible noise profile is extract 0.4 seconds of the beginning of an analog recording:
sox f1.wav f2.wav trim 0 0.40
sox f2.wav -n noiseprof noise.prof
sox f1.wav f3.wav noisered noise.prof 0.3

Finally I split by taking silence into account:
sox f3.wav f4.wav silence 1 0.2 5% 1 0.1 5% : newfile : restart

I just would like to first get the silence files instead of trimming.

By: Jason Navarrete

Jason Navarrete — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:48:53 +0000

This command should keep the original sound if it’s more than 0.5 seconds long. You might try it with another file or a test file to make sure you’ve got all the parameters correct.

By: Ken

Ken — Thu, 03 May 2012 06:22:54 +0000

Extremely useful, but….

I want split my file.
It start with a sound, not a silence, and I don’t want delete the initial sound.

This command delete the first sound:
sox in.wav out.wav silence 1 0.5 1% 1 5.0 1% : newfile : restart

suggesions

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:05:34 +0000

Thanks a lot. Ist was extremly helpfull!!

Greetings
Martin

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.