I've got a vocal track with some noise between phrases and I've been trying to use 'Remove Silence' to get rid of it, but with no success whatsoever.  It seemed that no matter what settings I fiddled with I couldn't get the function to do what I need - the noise stayed.  I'm now going to be forced to go through manually and split/trim/fade individual clips. Has anyone got any tips, or better still some settings they use so I can get some utility out of this function?
 
PS: Yes, I tried to search the forum but that has been broken for ages.

Google search works every time. When searching with Google add site:forum.cakewalk.com as part of the search criteria.
 
Have not used Remove Silence in years but would be glad to test with your audio track. Unless you need the split clips function, have you tried the other gates (Sonitus, Blue Tubes) bundled with SONAR? In the past I have used FFT noise reduction tools like the one included in SoundForge. Reaper has recently made their 64bit FFT tool Reafir available as part of Reaplugs.

I tend to use this on Tom Tracks ... Things which play seldom and are loud when they do hit. For vocals, I could probably split and fade the track manually faster because I would only trim between verses. I suppose if I were trimming all the songs in a set a set at once maybe.... But vocalists do lots of subtle stuff. It would be easy to trim something you shouldn't unless you give it a listen.

To use remove silence on vocals, I think I would have to not care very much.

Sometimes you've recorded a track that has noise that you can't hear so the "remove Noise" function will not work.  Try using the PC4K exp/gate Pro Channel plugin-in.  It works wonders for me with noisey Guitar tracks.  I have not tried it on a vocal track yet. 

You could also use a track envelope, either mute or volume would suffice.
 
This also lets you, if you want to, not fade down to digital silence but retain  a residual level of noise.
Sometime fading down to -INF, or deleting it entirely makes the result sound a little weird

Bristol_Jonesey
You could also use a track envelope, either mute or volume would suffice.
 
This also lets you, if you want to, not fade down to digital silence but retain  a residual level of noise.
Sometime fading down to -INF, or deleting it entirely makes the result sound a little weird

+1 on this. I often fade a vocal track significantly between verses but maybe 50% not 100%. Then I have slopes to bring the fader back up. It's easy to do this to a volume envelope by swiping to select a range in the track then ctrl clicking (nodes are automatically added) and you can reduce the level as desired then slide the nodes to make the sloping fades in and out.

scook
 In the past I have used FFT noise reduction tools like the one included in SoundForge. Reaper has recently made their 64bit FFT tool Reafir available as part of Reaplugs.

A lot depends on the kind and amount of noise. I favor the scook approach unless it's more of a gating situation (i.e., more like preamp hiss than problematic noise). But remember Anderton's First Law of Noise Reduction:
 
"Noise reduction works the best on signals with the least amount of noise."
 
And of course, there's the corollary...
 
"Pitch correction works best on signals with the least amount of pitch issues."

Thanks for the suggestions.
I always do my vocals via a Behringer gate rackmount unit which makes things clean as a whistle between phrases, but for some reason I forgot to switch the darn thing on for this session so between phrases I have a low level hum. I liked the takes I did though. I just thought Remove Silence was the tool to use for this sort of clean up of the gaps between phrases, but I'm going to use split/edit/fade instead, it won't take that long.
 
John

i used it as a kickstarter for cleaning 3 hours worth of voiceover recordings yesterday. Used with conservative settings it will at the very least split your clips at the appropriate points which acts as a visual cue for where to go in and fine tune your start/end points and fades. If a file was created when I saved my preset I will post it up tomorrow, however its may well be useless to you if the recordings are greatly different. One tip though is to use waveform zoom in order to get an accurate gauge for the db settings of the gate.