Plug-ins relating to length and silence.

Discussion forum for Amadeus users

Moderator: Martin Hairer

Post Reply
WGroleau
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed Nov 17, 2010 3:25 am

Plug-ins relating to length and silence.

Post by WGroleau »

Sorry I couldn't think of a clear, yet short enough subject line for what I'm looking for.

I understand a lot about physics of sound from my prior career in sonar, but I know nothing at all about they way people do things in the performance audio world.

I want to do some time editing of spoken word with minimal affect on the quality. These will be mono tracks.

Too much shortening or lengthening can make it sound less natural--people who talk slower lengthen vowels more than consonants. At even higher amounts, harmonics are affect making even weirder sounds.

To minimize this, plus make the next step easier, I would like to affect only "silences" in step one. I'll describe what I would code if I were on my own, but I'm amenable to using something already written if it comes close enough to the over-all goal.

1. Find all sound sections that are effectively silent, i.e., nothing but noise and very little of that, and that are longer than some number of milliseconds.

2. Make them completely silent with a very brief fade out/in

3. Shorten or lengthen them to make the entire selection a user-specified duration, except that if that if this makes a particular silence longer than a set maximum or shorter than a set minimum, use that max/min length. This is to avoid turning two words into one or having unnatural pauses between phrases.

The limits may prevent reaching the desired length, but by getting that much closer, I reduce the amount of change to the non-silent parts in the next step.

I read that there are "thousands of plugins" out there, but web searches seem to be finding lists that are more like "dozens" and they seem to be heavily weighted for musical effects.

I would prefer Nyquist, so that I can tweak it without having to separately compile. String two or more in sequence is OK if one plugin doesn't do it all.

Suggestions?

Thanks

(I'll put my second pass in another post.)
--
Wes Groleau

Monica Groleau, 1951-2010
http://UniGen.us/?itemid=95

Post Reply