Manually scrubbing through an hour-long podcast recording to cut out dead air is tedious enough that automatic silence removal has become a standard editing step, but the tools behind it are simpler than they seem, and understanding the two core settings they rely on is the difference between a natural-sounding edit and one that clips breaths and awkwardly chops sentences.
Threshold: how quiet counts as "silence"
Every silence detection tool needs a volume threshold, a decibel level below which audio is treated as silence rather than content. Set it too high (closer to 0dB, meaning it only counts truly dead air) and background hiss or a quiet breath won't register as silence, so nothing gets removed. Set it too low (very negative, like -60dB) and it becomes overly permissive, potentially treating quiet spoken words or trailing sentence endings as silence and cutting them out. A typical starting point around -35dB to -45dB catches genuine gaps between sentences while leaving quiet speech intact, though the right value depends heavily on the recording's own noise floor, checked easily with the Audio Spectrum Visualizer before choosing a threshold.
Minimum duration: avoiding choppy, unnatural cuts
The second setting, minimum duration, determines how long a quiet stretch has to last before it counts as removable silence rather than a normal conversational pause. Setting this too short (say, 100ms) removes brief natural pauses between words and phrases, making speech sound rushed and unnatural; a more typical setting around 400-800ms only targets genuinely long gaps, like a pause between distinct thoughts or an edited-out mistake. The Silence Detector identifies these stretches first so you can review them, and the Silence Remover then cuts them automatically, which is usually a safer workflow than blind automatic removal for anything you plan to publish. For manual review and precise trims around specific moments the automatic pass missed, Trim Audio handles those individually, and exporting chapter markers at natural topic breaks with Podcast Chapter Export is a common next step once the silence-trimmed episode is ready.