Since ancient times there is the "Remove Silence" function. I assume that this has never been used by anyone. I tried to cut a digitazed record from vinyl and tape into their songs.
Since 10 years it does completely no matter what you set at "Look Ahead". The clips are always split at the very beginning of the audio.
The help says:
The value in this field causes the gate to open slightly before the sound reaches the Open Level so you don’t lose the sound’s attack.
But when I set the value to 500 ms the clip is also splitted at the very beginning of starting audio. Not 500 ms before. Even if I'm not splitting, the audio is at -90 dB jaust 10 ms befor the audio starts. The noise is deletet althoug I set the gate to open within 500 ms BEFORE.
This value DOES NOTHING since 10 years or longer.
 
You should either fix this or take it out.
 

Actually look ahead doesn't do what you're expecting it to do. What it does is "look ahead" to see where a transient occurs so that it can open up the instant the transient hits, or slightly before. Without lookahead, when Remove Silence sees a transient it reacts, but there will always be a slight processing lag between the time it realizes there's a transient, and the time it takes to process the audio. The look-ahead value is how far ahead into the track the process looks. With today's fast computers, only a few milliseconds of look-ahead time should be necessary for a simple process like removing silence.
 
The look-ahead process is also why putting something like a Waves L3 in the master bus causes latency. It has a substantial built-in look-ahead time because it has to analyze transients in multiple bands at once. To compensate for this look-ahead time, the other tracks have to be delayed by an equal amount...hence the latency.
 
However...what you think it should do would be an excellent feature - call it a "Pre-Transient" time or something.
 
What's more concerning to me is that the Attack parameter is broken. This means I often have to adjust the attack time manually. It's been broken for a long time, and should be fixed.

Sorry to 'pick on you' twice in one day, Craig, but isn't this precisely the "longstanding issue with Remove Silence" you were referring to in this post?:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3382012
 
There is definitely a longstanding problem with Remove Silence that it ignores the 'Lookahead' setting, and will sometimes truncate attacks as a result. Remove silence is an offline process, so the meaning of 'lookahead' is different in this case, and has nothing to do with processing speed, buffering or latency. It is, as the documentation says, intended to open the gate a little early to perserve longer attacks.

spoken dialogs:
When you set the open level to -30 dB and the lookahead to 1000 ms the audio starts exact (1 ms) at the moment where the -30db begin. The noise floor (of spoken dialogs -40 dB) is completly deleted although - the lookahead 1000 ms has to open the gate "BEFORE" the -30 dB are reached. "s" and "t" from a begining speaking dialog are also missing. The gate does not open (1000 ms before) to preserve the attack from the dialog.

brundlefly
Sorry to 'pick on you' twice in one day, Craig, but isn't this precisely the "longstanding issue with Remove Silence" you were referring to in this post?:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3382012

 
That was still about my particular fixation with the attack time problem (i.e., not being able to set one). But, I stand corrected about the lookahead aspect...because of the attack time issue (BTW I don't think release works either), I haven't used Remove Silence in a long enough time that it being an offline process slipped what's left of my mind . I'm not sure where the second place was where you picked on me, but you were likely right there too.  
 
However that does seem like a pretty non-standard use of the word "lookahead." I know the audio industry doesn't have a language police, but it seems something like this function would merit a different term....although the Sonitus Noise Gate has a lookahead feature that is yet another kind of implementation.

Oh well ... I have always though that 'lookahead' means same as lookahead in every other plug-in.
I use Remove Silence every now and then, especially to clean silence from imported WAV files. A little facelift would do good for this feature. :)