Silence Detector — Find & Cut Dead Air in Your Videos
Pauses that felt natural while recording feel endless to a viewer. Drop your video or audio file and get every dead-air segment with exact timestamps, a listenable preview of each one, and a ready-made FFmpeg command to cut them all at once.
Audio is decoded & analyzed 100% in your browser — nothing is uploaded
Drop your video or audio file
MP4, MOV, WebM, MP3, WAV, M4A · Tip: for recordings over ~500 MB, drop the exported audio track instead — it's near-instant
Raise it if background noise hides obvious pauses; lower it if quiet speech gets flagged.
Pauses shorter than this are kept — natural breaths shouldn't be cut.
Padding kept around speech so cuts don't clip the start or end of words.
Verdict
Runtime
–
Dead air found
–
Silent segments
–
Tighter after cuts
–
Waveform
00:00
Speech / soundDead air (will be cut)Click anywhere on the waveform to listen from there
Cut list
#
From
To
Length
Listen
Remove them all in one command
FFmpeg cut command
If you have FFmpeg installed, this single command produces a tightened copy of your file with every detected silence removed. Otherwise, use the timestamp list above in your editor.
Why dead air is the cheapest edit you're not making
A pause that felt like a natural beat while you were recording plays very differently to someone deciding, second by second, whether to keep watching. Viewers interpret silence as "the video is over" — and on short-form platforms, the swipe that follows is reflexive. Professional editors tighten dead air instinctively; AI editing tools like Descript and Timebolt charge monthly subscriptions largely for automating this one cut. This tool gives you the detection half of that workflow for free, with no upload, no account, and no watermark.
Drop in any video or audio file and the Web Audio API decodes its soundtrack locally, measures loudness in 20-millisecond windows, and identifies every stretch that sits below your chosen threshold for longer than your minimum duration. The three sliders re-analyze instantly, so you can tune the sensitivity to your recording: raise the threshold if a noisy room is masking pauses, lower it if your quiet delivery is being flagged, and adjust the breathing-room padding so cuts never clip the first syllable after a pause.
Every detected segment is listenable in place — click it to hear exactly what would be cut — and the results export three ways: a human-readable timestamp list for manual editing, a CSV for spreadsheets or scripts, and a complete FFmpeg command that removes every silence in a single pass. For very long recordings, export just the audio track from your editor (MP3 or M4A) and the analysis finishes in seconds even for hours of material.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I remove silence from a video for free? ›
First find the silences: this tool scans your video locally and gives you every dead-air segment with exact timestamps. Then cut them in your editor using the timestamp list, or copy the generated FFmpeg command which removes all detected silences in one step without re-uploading anything.
Is my video uploaded when I use the silence detector? ›
No. The audio track is decoded and analyzed entirely in your browser using the Web Audio API. Nothing is transmitted to any server, and the analysis works offline once the page is loaded.
What threshold should I use to detect silence? ›
-40 dB works for most voice recordings. If the tool flags quiet speech as silence, lower the sensitivity (e.g. -50 dB). If it misses obvious pauses because of background noise like a fan or room tone, raise it (e.g. -35 or -30 dB). Adjusting the slider re-analyzes instantly.
What file types and sizes does it support? ›
Any video or audio file your browser can decode: MP4, MOV, WebM, MP3, WAV, M4A and more. Because the whole file is decoded in memory, it works best under roughly 500 MB of video — for long recordings, export the audio track alone (MP3/M4A) and analysis is near-instant even for hours of content.
How does the FFmpeg command remove the silences? ›
The tool inverts the silence list into a keep-list of speech segments and builds a single FFmpeg command using select/aselect filters that keeps only those segments and re-times the output. Paste it into a terminal with FFmpeg installed, and you get a tightened copy of your video with all dead air removed.
Why does removing dead air improve retention? ›
Pauses that feel natural while recording feel twice as long to a viewer deciding whether to keep watching. Short-form audiences in particular interpret silence as the video being over and swipe away. Tightening dead air is the highest-impact, lowest-skill edit you can make.