Trim Silence from End cutting off end of song

[zipzip]

On a .wav that I am converting to Apple Lossless, Trim Silence works fine on the beginning of the song... but at the end, if I have it set at anything but digital 0, it cuts the song off several seconds early. I have the detection threshold at 50 and the value at -45, the default for both.

On this particular song (Michael Jackson's "Way You Make Me Feel" from the 1988 US CD single), there seems to be silence above "0" at the beginning and end of the track, because setting Trim Silence at 0 does nothing for this particular track. Setting it to the default threshold and value works perfectly on the beginning... but at the end it cuts the song off about three seconds early. I tried doing them as separate DPSs and also tried doing it for the end only and not the beginning... works the same every time. The end of the song is cut off.

Any idea what the problem might be? I see it was a problem mentioned in the below thread over a decade ago, but I don't see a follow-up:

https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?6534-Remove-Silence-settings&highlight=silence+cuts

[Spoon]

Re: Trim Silence from End cutting off end of song

Try lowering the db value, something like -60db

[zipzip]

Re: Trim Silence from End cutting off end of song

Thanks, Spoon. -80db seems to be the magic number for this track. Turns out there is some very low-volume tape hiss that is audible if I crank the volume waaaaay up, that extends quite a ways beyond the end of the song. Tried -60 and it was cut off not as early, but still cut off before the end of the song. -90 and -85 did nothing, just as if it were set at digital 0. -80 seemed to work perfectly. Thanks.

[schmidj]

Re: Trim Silence from End cutting off end of song

For cases like this, manually using an audio editor, like the free Audacity, is probably much simpler than trying to use the silence trim DSP. Open the file in Audacity, select something near the end of the song. If you enlarge the waveform vertically, the point the music ends should be obvious, if not, listen to it to find the point, set the cursor there, select everything following that point and delete it, then save the edited file. Takes longer to explain here than to do it.

[zipzip]

Re: Trim Silence from End cutting off end of song

For cases like this, manually using an audio editor, like the free Audacity, is probably much simpler than trying to use the silence trim DSP. Open the file in Audacity, select something near the end of the song. If you enlarge the waveform vertically, the point the music ends should be obvious, if not, listen to it to find the point, set the cursor there, select everything following that point and delete it, then save the edited file. Takes longer to explain here than to do it.

Thanks, schmidj. I actually do have CoolEdit Pro and Magix Audio Cleaning Lab, and I did try trimming the hiss off the front and end of the file with those as well. I just wanted to know if there was a way to do it automatically with dBpoweramp, as I'm converting the thousands of .wav files on my hard drive to ALAC, and I want it to all be automatic. Though I did decide to just leave the Trim setting at "0" Digital Silence... Since I'm going to delete the original .wavs, I can't risk any mistakes.

[davidhall]

Re: Trim Silence from End cutting off end of song

Manually top and tailing is the way to go. If you have to set the threshold to -80 for it to work properly on this particular track, there will be hundreds of others that don't come out satisfactorily due to the threshold being set so low. I maintain a library of songs for a radio playout system and over the last few years I have manually top and tailed over 3000 songs. Its the only way to make sure they turn out the way you want them. And as far as deleteting the originals, all I can say is don't. Convert the original rips to flac before you modify them in any way and keep them. Put them on a portable hard disk. Hard disk storage is cheap.

[zipzip]

Re: Trim Silence from End cutting off end of song

Manually top and tailing is the way to go. If you have to set the threshold to -80 for it to work properly on this particular track, there will be hundreds of others that don't come out satisfactorily due to the threshold being set so low. I maintain a library of songs for a radio playout system and over the last few years I have manually top and tailed over 3000 songs. Its the only way to make sure they turn out the way you want them. And as far as deleteting the originals, all I can say is don't. Convert the original rips to flac before you modify them in any way and keep them. Put them on a portable hard disk. Hard disk storage is cheap.

That's why I decided to go with Digital Zero only, David. I have more like 50,000 .wav files I'm converting to Apple Lossless on a 2 terabyte hard drive. Manually top and tailing that many just isn't feasible for me. I'm confident that I will lose no music with the Digital "0" setting. And, yes, of course, I would never delete the original if I were converting these to lossy files.