Remove pauses from audio online
Shorten long pauses and silent gaps in speech recordings — tighten podcasts, interviews, and voiceovers.
This tool removes the pauses from a spoken recording. It runs ffmpeg's silenceremove filter, compiled to WebAssembly and executed in your own browser, which deletes every gap that stays below a loudness threshold for longer than the minimum length you set. Two controls do all the work: a sensitivity tier that sets the threshold at -25, -30 or -35 dB, and a minimum pause length between 0.5 and 5 seconds. Be clear about what this is and is not — it detects silence, not speech. It does not transcribe your audio and it cannot find an 'um' or an 'uh', because those are sounds, not gaps. Recordings where a speaker fills every hesitation with a noise will come back barely shorter. Recordings full of real dead air will come back dramatically tighter.
Key facts about Remove pauses from audio online
| Filter | ffmpeg silenceremove with stop_periods=-1, so every qualifying gap anywhere in the file is removed, not just the leading one |
|---|---|
| Gentle sensitivity | -25 dB threshold — only clearly silent gaps |
| Balanced sensitivity | -30 dB threshold — the default, standard quiet level |
| Aggressive sensitivity | -35 dB threshold — also catches faint room tone as silence |
| Minimum pause | Slider from 0.5 s to 5 s in 0.25 s steps, default 1.5 s; internally clamped to the 0.1-5 s range the filter accepts |
| What it detects | Silence only. There is no speech recognition anywhere in this tool, so spoken filler words are never identified |
| Output format | The input's own container, with a _trimmed suffix on the filename — an MP3 stays an MP3 |
| Re-encode | The file is decoded and re-encoded once, because removing time from the middle cannot be done by stream copy |
| Stats | Original and trimmed durations are probed after processing so you see exactly how many seconds went |
| Accepted input | MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC and M4A, up to 200 MB |
| Cancellable | Stopping a run terminates the WebAssembly worker immediately rather than waiting for the filter to finish |
What happens to your file
The recording is processed by ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, running in a Web Worker inside this tab. Your file is written into that worker's in-memory filesystem, filtered and read back as a blob — it is never sent anywhere, and there is no transcription service involved because no transcription happens. The only network request is the one-time fetch of the ffmpeg core, a fixed 32 MB public asset from the jsDelivr CDN that your browser caches and reuses across every audio tool here; it carries nothing of yours. The trimmed file exists as a blob: URL in your own tab until you download it.
About this tool
- 1
Add the recording
Drop an MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC or M4A up to 200 MB. The page reads its duration so it can show you how much was removed afterwards.
- 2
Pick a sensitivity
Gentle at -25 dB only removes clear silence. Balanced at -30 dB is the default. Aggressive at -35 dB also treats faint room tone as a pause, which is right for clean studio audio and wrong for a noisy room.
- 3
Set the minimum pause length
Only gaps longer than this are cut. 1.5 seconds is a good default for conversation; drop to 0.75 s for a tighter edit, raise past 3 s if you only want to lose genuine dead air.
- 4
Process
The filter runs in a WebAssembly worker with a live progress percentage. You can stop at any point, which kills the worker rather than letting it finish.
- 5
Compare the durations
The stats grid shows original length, trimmed length and seconds removed. Play both back; if the speech now runs together without breathing room, raise the minimum pause length and run again.
- 6
Download
The file comes back in its original format with a _trimmed suffix, ready to publish or drop into an edit.
| Input formats | MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC, M4A |
|---|---|
| Maximum file size | 200 MB — input, decoded audio and output share one ~2 GB WebAssembly heap |
| Output format | Same as the input, with a _trimmed suffix |
| Threshold range | -25 dB, -30 dB or -35 dB by tier |
| Pause length range | 0.5 s to 5 s, in 0.25 s steps |
| Engine download | ~32 MB ffmpeg core, fetched once and cached |
| Speed | Single-threaded WebAssembly; a one-hour podcast is a multi-minute job on a typical laptop |
| Browsers | Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari 15+; needs WebAssembly and Web Workers |
- Check the seconds-removed figure before you trust the result. If it is near zero, your speaker fills pauses with sound and this tool cannot help — the gaps are not actually silent.
- Aggressive sensitivity is for clean recordings only. In a room with air conditioning the noise floor never drops to -35 dB, so nothing gets removed at all.
- Long minimum pause lengths produce natural-sounding edits. Short ones tighten the speech but make it sound clipped, because normal speech rhythm relies on gaps under a second.
- If the recording is noisy, run the noise reducer first. Lowering the noise floor is what makes silence detection work at all.
- For fine control over exactly where cuts land, and for padding around each kept region, use the silence remover instead — it shows you a silence map before it processes.
- Every run re-encodes lossy input once. On a file you are going to edit further, work from a WAV and encode at the very end.
- The output keeps its extension, so a trimmed MP3 goes straight into a podcast host with no conversion step.
- ffmpeg silenceremove running client-side on WebAssembly
- Three sensitivity tiers at -25, -30 and -35 dB
- Minimum pause length from 0.5 to 5 seconds
- Before and after playback with a source switch
- Duration stats showing exactly how much was removed
- Output keeps the input's own format and container
- Cancellable mid-run
- Tightening a remote interview where the connection made both people wait before answering
- Trimming the dead air out of a solo podcast recorded in one take
- Shortening a webinar or meeting recording before archiving it
- Cutting the long gaps out of a voice memo dictated while thinking
- Making a lecture recording faster to listen to without changing playback speed
- Removing the silence at the start and end of a take along with everything in between
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