Trim function not working properly

[oohyeah]

Hi all,

Trying out Music Converter before buying, but encountered problems with trimming.

We have many files which have silences in the beginning and end of the audio. I need them trimmed very tight, like 5ms (or 10ms max). The silences are 'real' silences (flat-line), so I specify silence means 0db. This conversion is from mp3 to wav.

I apply that to the batch, but find that some files have the silence completely chopped off from the end, with no more silence whatsoever. The beginning audio seemed to be trimmed correctly, but I didn't check the time to make sure.

Then I try it again, but this time I uncheck the "trim ending" option, so that it only trims the beginning. However, the result is virtually identical - the ending still gets trimmed.

Next, I try it again with a different batch, to trim both the beginning and end, setting the detection threshold to 10ms. Now the weirdest thing happens, for some files, silence actually gets added to the end, instead of being trimmed!

NOte: we are talking about files with audio of around 1 sec or less (eg., a word like "cat"). Maybe the silence was already less than 10ms for the file, and the program got confused? Or was it still trying to perform the previous 'add silence' function?

This is the batch of files I tried last:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/634msqk93syohgo/samples.zip

I just need all files auto-trimmed so that there is no more than 10ms of silence in the beginning and end.

Would really appreciate help on this to get this working, cos we have thousands of files we need to trim. Hence I would gladly purchase the software and make a bonus donation if it can be done properly!

Thanks lots.

[Spoon]

Re: Trim function not working properly

Try this:

Non-Live DSP Effect
Write Silence (2x oe to add 1 second to front + 1 second to end)
Trim Silence

[oohyeah]

Re: Trim function not working properly

Thanks for the reply.

This is what I did:

1. Converted all the mp3's to PCM wav (in case that made any difference).

2. Did write silence twice, once to add 1 sec to beginning, another to add 1 sec to end. The second one displayed an error for some of the files, but when I checked in Audition, they all look fine - ie., now there's about 1 sec extra silence front and back on all files. So far so good.

3. I did Trim Silence, beginning and end, set sensitivity to 10ms, and threshold to be at default -45db.

The product was that now the files each have about 3ms silence at the beginning, and about 30+ms at the end.

Something's clearly not working right.

You can reproduce it using the sample I gave.

Thanks again for your help.

[Spoon]

Re: Trim function not working properly

You will be contacted by email shortly.

[daren]

Re: Trim function not working properly

Just to close this thread and hopefully to help others with the same (or a similar) problem....

We've had e-mail contact about this issue. The original files had low level audio in the "silence" at the beginning and end of the input files (the silence was not digital 0). In the end we were able to get very good (tight) results by using a threshold of 5mS and specify that silence is any value below -35dB. It is also important to output linear audio files (e.g. linear WAV), as formats like MP3 add extra silence at the beginning and end of the track. The silence added by some codecs usually goes unnoticed, but in this case (very short audio files) the extra silence became noticeable.

Hope this helps anyone experiencing the same problem.

Best regards,
Daren.