Cut on the gaps, not on the clock
Load one long recording and get back the pieces between its silences. A vinyl side becomes separate tracks. An hour of voice memos becomes one file per thought. A batch of takes recorded in a single pass becomes one file per take.
Detected pieces are drawn and numbered on the waveform before anything is written, so the settings can be judged by looking rather than by exporting and checking.
Threshold and shortest break
Threshold is the level below which audio counts as silence. Digital silence is far below anything a microphone produces: room tone usually sits between -60 and -40 dB, and vinyl surface noise higher still. Start at -45 dB and raise it until the gaps are found.
Shortest break is how long the quiet has to last before it becomes a split. This is the control that separates a pause from an ending. Speech pauses run to about a second; the gap between two tracks or two takes runs longer. The default of 1.5 seconds sits between them.
Padding and shortest piece
Padding extends each piece at both ends into the silence beside it. Without it, pieces start exactly on the first sound, which clips the front of a word and sounds abrupt. 200 ms is enough to breathe.
Shortest piece drops fragments. A cough between takes or a click on a record would otherwise be written as its own numbered file. Raising this to a few seconds keeps the output to real material.
Detection resolution
Silence is measured on the same peak envelope the waveform is drawn from, one value per bin rather than one per sample. That is why the pieces on screen are the pieces in the ZIP, and why the shortest useful break is measured in tenths of a second rather than in milliseconds.
Removing gaps instead of splitting on them
To close the pauses inside one file and keep it as a single file, the silence remover does that job with the same detection controls.