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ellismosss/strip-silence

15TypeScriptAudience · generalComplexity · 2/5Setup · hard

TLDR

An Ableton Live extension that automatically detects and removes silent gaps from audio tracks, with controls for threshold, timing buffers, beat snapping, and automatic ripple editing to close the resulting holes.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((strip-silence))
    What it does
      Removes silent gaps
      Slides clips together
      Snaps cuts to beat
    Controls
      Threshold setting
      Minimum duration
      Pre and post roll
    How to trigger
      Right-click track header
      Right-click time selection
    Setup
      Single file install
      Ableton Preferences drag
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Speed up podcast editing by automatically cutting out long pauses between speakers and closing the gaps in one step.

USE CASE 2

Clean up a recorded instrument track by removing quiet sections between phrases without dragging clip edges manually.

USE CASE 3

Tighten a long interview or voiceover session so audio clips land cleanly on beats before mixing.

Tech stack

TypeScriptAbleton Extensions SDKNode.js

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

The Ableton Extensions SDK required to build this is only available to Ableton beta testers, making self-built installs inaccessible to most users.

In plain English

Strip Silence is a plugin for Ableton Live, the popular music production software. Its job is simple: scan your audio tracks, find the quiet parts, and cut them out automatically. Without a tool like this, removing silence by hand means dragging clip edges one by one, which gets tedious fast on a long recording session. You install it as an Ableton extension by downloading a single file and dragging it into Ableton's Preferences panel. Once installed, it shows up in the right-click menu inside the Arrangement view, which is the timeline where you lay out your audio clips. The tool gives you several controls for how it decides what counts as silence. The threshold setting tells it how quiet something needs to be before it is treated as silent. The minimum duration setting means a very brief dip in volume will not be treated as silence, which helps avoid cutting through natural breaths or room tone you actually want to keep. Pre-roll and post-roll settings let you leave a small buffer of quiet at the start and end of each cut, so the audio does not feel abruptly chopped. You can also tell it to snap each cut point to the nearest beat in your project, which is useful for keeping everything rhythmically tidy. One feature called ripple edit automatically slides all the remaining clips together after the silent gaps are removed, so you do not end up with empty holes scattered across your timeline. You can trigger the tool either on a specific time selection across one or more tracks, or on an entire track at once by right-clicking the track header. The project is written in TypeScript using the Ableton Extensions SDK, which is a newer system Ableton has been developing. Building it yourself requires Node.js and access to the SDK, which is currently only available to Ableton beta testers.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I have Strip Silence installed in Ableton. What threshold and minimum duration settings should I use to clean up a vocal recording without cutting through natural breaths?
Prompt 2
Walk me through using Strip Silence with ripple edit enabled to remove all silences from a 45-minute podcast recording in Ableton's Arrangement view.
Prompt 3
I want to process a drum recording with Strip Silence but keep the room tone between hits. What settings prevent it from cutting too aggressively?
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