How to reduce pauses in voice recording?

Besides going in and deleting chunks by eye in SoundForge, is there a way (ideally some Sound Forge function I haven't discovered, or a VST plug, that will detect stretches of audio that fall below a certain level and reduce the length of them globally (like some percentage?)

It would ......................................    really be handy  ...................................... to edit recordings  ......................................  of a certain  ...................................... speaker that  ......................................  talks  ......................................like this.    

I want to keep some of the cadence, but want to pick up the pace without time-compressing the words themselves.  

(obviously I have Sound Forge (V9) at my disposal.  Also Sonar 8.5 Producer Edition)
     

-edit-

completely misread what you posted.  Some DAW's have a trim silence feature.  Not sure about Soundforge but it might.

-Casey

signalflow said:

-edit-

completely misread what you posted.  Some DAW's have a trim silence feature.  Not sure about Soundforge but it might.

-Casey

Click to expand...

Actually I should have mentioned that I did try SoundForge's Auto Trim.  The problem is that it messes up the overall pacing.  At its default setting, it sounds great--like a radio commercial--but this recording is a sermon.  If I set the minimum silence length longer, it leaves some gaps alone, but the longest ones are trimmed too closely. 

What I'm looking for is a selection function to find and select all the areas of silence, so that I can process only the silent stretches with time compression to *proportionally* shorten those up (like 2x speed)

sounds to me like i did on my first pro I mean paid session, which was to edit book on tape stuff. a razor, a 2 track mx5050 and a set of head phones. multiple reels of tape. Things have come along way since with digital and such.  Unfortunately best to do by hand and by ear. You can remove the pauses but it can sometimes mess up the cadence, rhythm and flow. Much like you can add silence and totally change the pace of in your case a sermon. Not to mention you have to be objective about your edits as you can get so used to hearing a spoken phrase a certain way that the moment you change it and make it flow nicely  it may sound wrong. Good luck...

+1 for the by hand and by ear

If you want a really pro edit, unfortunately the only way is by hand and by ear.

For me, the best and quickest program to edit audio is Pro-Tools. If you only what to edit you can get the M-box Micro for under £150, Pro-Tools software included.

+1 for manually with protools. strip silence and then sliding the clips to where they sound good. or tab to transient, cut, then slide back. you can get pretty damn quick.

I was afraid of that.  It's a gratis podcast gig for my own church.  I thought especially hard about an automated solution again after spending an unclocked amount of time yesterday surgically removing a total of 8 minutes of silence in from a 25 minute recording in 1-10 second chunks.

Maybe I'll dive into the VST software development kit and try my hand at writing a plugin to do that.  Oh no, not another DIY project to start and leave incomplete!  :

I guess when I get paid for this gig, I'm hoping to find the recording studios in Heaven are, well, heavenly.  ;D

If you're going to dive into VST development, a good algorithm for your purpose was described in the late 70's by Rabbiner and Sambur in their article "An Algorithm for Determining the Endpoints for Isolated Utterances". That's an easy to implement algorithm. You will find a lot of information and different approaches to that topic by searching for voice activity detection (VAT). The hardest thing to do seems to be the VST stuff.  

As an engineer that records and edits long-from interactive training materials for quite a few major retailers, I know your pain.  Imagine sifting through over 100 pages of retail cashier training.  A quick plug-in for this wouldn't be nice, but as Pucho mentioned there's a human element to maintaining a natural flow. 

at least your not working on this.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTXsAOpSf9k