Only remove silence from "Shorten Word Gaps" (Strip Silence) | Voters

Only remove silence from "Shorten Word Gaps" (Strip Silence)

Bryan Schiele

If there's laughter or unknown words after transcription, the Shorten Word Gaps feature wants to remove those sections, leaving a choppy edit if you wanted to select "Apply to all". For example, in this screenshot, the name "I-17" (a road here in Arizona) isn't recognized and would be cut if I used the "Apply to All" option.

July 8, 2020

Mark Frost

Not having this adds hours to my workflow. Its so frustrating that such a simple piece of software like audacity can do it but descript insists on its over engineered 'word gap' feature which sucks.

David F

Any update on this? I will cancel my subscription because of this.....

Chris Ridgeway

This outstanding issue (for 3 years?) still means that we never use the word gaps feature. It's a selling point but not useful. It cuts into laughter or wanted non-word dialog, and does it so often we wind up undoing most of the edits if we do it in batch. And transcription errors with it missing the beginning or ends of words (still very common for us--say one or two transcription mistakes a minute), means that the word gaps tool destroys all those as well, meaning I've introduced hundreds of errors into the audio i have to go back and check. 
If this actually did silence only, it'd be miles more useful.
If somehow it used AI to be super smart, I'd love that too, but please give us this great feature to use but can't!

Aaron Bay

Is this still planned? Right now this is probably my most frustrating issue. I can't trust descript to "Apply to all" with word gaps because then I spend almost as much time going through and undoing a bunch of them. Also I see this is in Descript Classic, but this is still an issue in the new Descript as well.

Andrew Mason

marked this post as

open

Belief Hole Podcast

Andrew Mason: Hey, so I see this issue has gone from under review to open, does that mean it's not being planned at the moment? What does the 'Open' status indicate. Thanks

Andrew Mason

marked this post as

under consideration

Belief Hole Podcast

Andrew Mason: Does this mean this improvement will be happening eventually? Cause that would be amazing. Right now I have to download the session from Descript (after removing filler words) and then use Reaper to shorten the word gaps.

Greg

This also applies to music cues or foreign languages. Descript removes it all when 'shorten word gaps' is applied. Appreciate the fix~

Dan Reyes-Cairo

Merged in a post:

Strip silence

Hubert Hiemstra

I used to use an editing tool (Ferrite) that gave you the ability to automatically remove all the gaps between speech in an individual track with one click without adjusting the time line. In multitrack recordings this was useful at the start of editing to auto-delete everything except the current speaker, so getting rid of background noise, throat clearing etc that interfered with the speaker.

April 11, 2022

J D

I wonder how many customers (meaning end users of the videos produced by Descript) would like to have an option to play the video or podcast with a mode that lets them "skip silence" but if they wish be able to listen to it. Would it be more interesting to put this option as an end user option in addition to an editor option?

For example:

I create a video or podcast and I really don't want anybody to hear the gaps, so I remove them. Makes sense.
I create a video and I don't mind if the gaps are left in the material because some of my audience really want the uncut version, but they may want to have a way to skip forward from time to time also. Makes sense also.

So, the toggle might be useful in both the editor and in the player so the user can turn it on or off... Sort of gives Descript a value add if both options are available...

Nono Martínez Alonso

J D: This is a great idea. Many tools are implementing this as a feature. Apple Voice Memos has an option named "skip silence" that lets you play the same audio with or without silences. YouTube could add such a function. It may be a bit hard to implement this on podcast feeds though.

Tom Solid

YEAH! I hope Descript will give us a threshold picker to identify what is actual silence. Sometimes people are whispering or getting quiter in the end of their sentence which is also recognized as Word Gaps. If we have control, showing Descript what is actual Silence in the recording, it would help avoiding mispicks.

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