brundlefly
SONAR has a Process > Remove Silence function that is basically a destructive gate that gives you the option to just flatline audio below the gate level or delete it, splitting the remaining audio into separate clips with gaps where the silence was. ... then increase the tempo of the project to shorten all the pauses by the ratio of the old tempo to the new one

Interesting idea.  I wasn't really thinking about doing this under SONAR, but I'll give that process a try.  Even if it isn't the result I need, I'll learn something in the process.  Thanks.

If a DAW removes silence and creates a whole lot of separate clips then you will have to move them. Also you run the risk of clicks and things happening on the boundaries of the clips themselves. Moving them all is also slower. DAW's are not designed for this sort of work so much. You should have a proper editor anyway, they are very helpful.
 
As I said a proper editor is better. Just swipe the unwanted area, single key command and its gone and all material moved down in one hit. Faster. Also you start to get good at identifying things like grunts and breaths and things too. You do have to make sure the waveform is sufficiently high enough as well so you can see the low level stuff a bit easier.  All these edits are non destructive too so if you accidently remove something important it is very easy to undo and go back to where you were a few seconds ago and re do something.
 
It does not take very long to do even an hour of material. You should be able to do about an hour program edit in about two hours.

It definitely exists because I hear the end product all the time in video tutorials, especially those on Lynda.com and Groove3. They overuse it IMO - I've been watching a Bobby Owsinski mixing course and you can hear an edit in what seems like every second sentence or so. Overused like this, it sounds very unnatural and a bit irritating. 

cparmerlee

brundlefly
SONAR has a Process > Remove Silence function that is basically a destructive gate that gives you the option to just flatline audio below the gate level or delete it, splitting the remaining audio into separate clips with gaps where the silence was. ... then increase the tempo of the project to shorten all the pauses by the ratio of the old tempo to the new one

Interesting idea.  I wasn't really thinking about doing this under SONAR, but I'll give that process a try.  Even if it isn't the result I need, I'll learn something in the process.  Thanks.

Never tried but I believe (free) audacity does this - http://manual.audacitytea.org/man/Truncate_Silence

Brando
Never tried but I believe (free) audacity does this - http://manual.audacitytea.org/man/Truncate_Silence

Thanks for that pointer.  I never noticed that in Audacity.  It seems like the parameters should give me enough control to make this sound natural.  With audio, I don't think it should be a big problem.  Video would be a much bigger problem making it appear seamless.
 
On edit: I just tried this and it works GREAT !!!.  In under a minute I was able to remove 5 minutes from a 22-minute interview (not counting the part where they played music tracks) and it sounds perfectly natural.  It actually is easier to listen to than the original because I found some of the pauses annoyingly long.  I adjusted the Audacity defaults a little.  I set the silence threshold to -30 dB, space compression to 5:1 and the max pause to 900 ms.  I'll go back through and remove the grunts and other extraneous sounds, but that will only take 20 minutes.

cparmerlee

Brando
Never tried but I believe (free) audacity does this - http://manual.audacitytea.org/man/Truncate_Silence

Thanks for that pointer.  I never noticed that in Audacity.  It seems like the parameters should give me enough control to make this sound natural.  With audio, I don't think it should be a big problem.  Video would be a much bigger problem making it appear seamless.
 
On edit: I just tried this and it works GREAT !!!.  In under a minute I was able to remove 5 minutes from a 22-minute interview (not counting the part where they played music tracks) and it sounds perfectly natural.  It actually is easier to listen to than the original because I found some of the pauses annoyingly long.  I adjusted the Audacity defaults a little.  I set the silence threshold to -30 dB, space compression to 5:1 and the max pause to 900 ms.  I'll go back through and remove the grunts and other extraneous sounds, but that will only take 20 minutes.

Glad it worked. Definitely something I will keep in mind in the future when doing this type of thing myself.

Some of you may remember when somebody came on here a few years ago offering a paid job as a podcast editor. He provided a sample podcast and invited anyone interested in the gig to submit an edited version. I had intended to do so, but after editing the mind-numbingly boring podcast I realized that this was the audio equivalent of sweatshop piecework.
 
At the time it occurred to me that there must be a software solution to at least aid in the process. I tried SONAR's "remove silence" feature but it sounded very unnatural, no matter how much I tweaked the settings. There seemed to be no alternative to manually listening to each pause and adjusting to suit the speaker's cadence and intent. It's hard and extremely tedious. 
 
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and clumsy edits are the norm, even though most of them are audio-related podcasts and hosted by professional audio engineers. It's not that the editors don't know how to do it, it's just that after a few hours you get sloppy. If you're diligent, it'll take 3 or 4 hours to edit 1 hour of spoken word.
 
The best approach, I think, would be a hybrid process: remove the largest pauses with Audacity and then tidy it up manually from there. (Thanks for pointing out this feature in Audacity - I didn't know it was there.)

bitflipper
The best approach, I think, would be a hybrid process: remove the largest pauses with Audacity and then tidy it up manually from there.

Yes, I agree.  That's what I did on this project.  Audacity's tool is an analogous to a dynamics compressor.  It doesn't automatically truncate all silence down to a set value.  If you are over the minimum value, it reduced the gap by a ratio (4:1 by default).  If you are still over the max gap size, it truncates down to the max size.  So with a ratio of 3:1 or 2:1, the original cadence is preserved (in relative terms).  In my case the interview was from 1988 with a couple of older guys who were slow-speakers to start with.  In 2014, this pace is excruciating, so I wanted to change the cadence.
 
I probably did another 40 edits manually.  Some were to further tweak the cadence.  Others were to eliminate stutters.  And in some cases, there was enough background noise to throw off the Audacity tool, leaving 2- or 3-second gaps that I had to remove manually.
 
I think there are "zero crossing" settings in Audacity that can help eliminate pops at the edit points.  But I didn't do that properly and ended up with a couple dozen light pops.  I simply ran this through Izotope RX3 to eliminate those editing artifacts.
 
After speeding up the cadence and clearing out most of the time spent playing audio tracks, what was originally a 50-minute recording is now a higher-impact 20-minute program.