Cut silences
After using for a while Overcast app for iPhone I appreciate the feature of automatic silences removal, to speed up the playback without spending up the speech. Basically you should define a maximum "pause" (=significantly quieter passage) between words and cut any additional pause you encounter. This can save up to 15% of the playback time. Of course, since you want to check volume level and not audio samples , you may find more efficient to work on the FFT coefficients in the compressed audio.
Edit: The beta has been published. Please let me know how it works for you. Thanks
A new beta will be available before the end of the week with a ‘silence skip’ feature.
This feature will remain in beta for some time, because I guess it will need some tweaking, so please, try the beat and let me know if you’re having sound quality issue. Depending on the podcast I saved from 1.5% up to 20%
Please subscribe to the beta channel (http://podcastaddict.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/253911-how-to-join-the-beta-program) in order to test it and to give me some feedback
Thanks
Edit:
Available in the latest v2.31.1
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Denis Pankov commented
Works great on Galaxy S4, thank you for this new feature.
I would recommend 1) moving it to the playback speed menu, since it's most related to that, and 2) allowing for adjustable control of how aggressive the silence cutting is.
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The latest beta allows you to see the time saved by this feature. It won't take into account episodes listened to before this version.
You will find this information in Settings/Player/Audio player/Skip silence
It's not updated in real time so you need to exit / reopen the screen to see the latest value.
The time saved by this feature really depends on the podcast. If there's some background music or constant background noise, it won't save a lot of time. If the episode has been edited to remove silences it won't solve a lot. But on some podcasts I got 20% of saved time -
Steven commented
Listened to a couple more podcasts this morning with no issues. May have just been a one off issue with the other podcast. Though I agree with Olaf, it would be nice to see how much time is being saved.
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Olaf Marzocchi commented
I tried it and I hear no artifacts, but I also cannot estimate how much it is working. Maybe for the betas you could update the speed indicator on top with also the effective speed-up? or use that indicator as overall speed-up (speed control times effective speed-up associated with the cut silences)
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Steven commented
I'm using a Galaxy S3. Playback works fine at 2.0x and even 3.0x.
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I don't have ay issue on my devices. Which device are you using ? Does the variable playback speed works fine at 2.0x for example or is it also skipping ?
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Steven commented
No problem.
http://nightvale.libsyn.com/ref it was Episode 23 - Eternal Scouts. It was playing locally. -
Please let me know the podcast RSS feed url and episode name. To do so, long press on the podcast (not the episode), then select Copy to clipboard and paste the result here.
Can you also tell me if you're streaming or playing a local file ?Thanks
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Steven commented
Just downloaded and listened to one podcast. I'm hearing a lot of static/lag when listening with silence skip on. Maybe my phone doesn't have enough ram or processing power to keep up with the audio? I'm using a Galaxy S3.
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Steven commented
Just came here to suggest this. As someone who only has so much time in a day to listen to too many podcasts (and can only speed up the audio so much before they all start sounding funny) I would love to be able to cut out the silences and shave time off each episode.