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Silence remover.
Trim the dead air off the ends.
Cut the silence from the start and end of a file, with a threshold you control and padding if you want a soft start protected. The reason to bother is not file size — it is that leading silence is what makes the same track get a different cue point every time you import it.
Drop tracks to trim
WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 or M4A. Drop a whole folder’s worth — one set of settings is applied to all of them and they come back as a single archive. Nothing is uploaded; the page makes no network request.
The reason it is not about file size
Two copies, two different cue points.
This is the problem the tool exists for, and almost nobody selling a silence remover mentions it.
A track you bought from one store and the same track from a promo pool are frequently not byte-identical at the head. One starts on the first beat and the other has 400 milliseconds of digital silence in front of it. Both play identically, both look identical in a folder, and both will be analysed differently the moment they hit your DJ software, because the auto cue lands where the sound starts and the sound starts in two different places.
That is why the same track sometimes drops in a different place after a library rebuild, and why cue points that survived one migration do not survive the next. It is not a bug in your software — it is your software doing exactly what it should with two files that are genuinely different. The fix is upstream: make the audio start where the music starts, and the cue lands in the same place every time on every machine.
The same logic applies to the tail. A file that was stopped rather than faded ends with a hard cut into whatever silence the encoder padded it with, and lossy formats add their own — an MP3 has encoder delay and padding baked into it that a decoder is supposed to strip and does not always. Trimming the tail gets you a file that ends when the music does, which is what gapless playback and a clean loop both need.
Silence at the head moves your cue point
Rekordbox sets its auto cue at the first sound above a threshold, and Serato and Traktor do something similar. That is fine until you have two copies of the same track with different amounts of dead air in front — a purchase and a promo, a rip and a re-download — and the auto cue lands in a different place on each. Any hot cue you set relative to it is now wrong, and a memory cue you exported does not survive a re-import. Trimming the head is how you make a collection's cue points reproducible instead of accidental.
A threshold you can move, because tracks differ
The default of -60 dBFS is silence for practical purposes and catches almost everything. It is adjustable because two different problems live at either end: a file with genuine digital silence at the head needs a very low threshold to avoid trimming into a soft intro, and a file with tape hiss or a noisy transfer needs a higher one because the "silence" is not silent. The threshold is absolute rather than relative to the track, deliberately — a relative floor would happily eat the first bar of a delicate intro, and losing a bar is far worse than leaving 200 ms of hiss.
Padding, so a soft start survives
A hard cut exactly at the first sample above the threshold can clip the attack off a soft entry and leave a click where the waveform starts from a non-zero value. So you can keep a chosen amount of silence on each end — 50 or 100 milliseconds is usually plenty. Head and tail are separately switchable, because the common case is trimming the front and leaving a reverb tail alone.
Thresholds
Which floor for which file
The threshold is the level below which a sample counts as nothing. The right one depends on what is in the quiet part.
| Threshold | What it catches | When it is right |
|---|---|---|
| -80 dB | Only genuine digital silence, or very close to it. | A clean export from a DAW. Anything above true zero is real audio and you want all of it. |
| -70 dB | Digital silence plus the very lowest noise floor. | A cautious default when the intro is soft and you would rather leave hiss than lose a note. |
| -60 dB | Silence and inaudible room tone. The default. | Almost everything. Well below anything you would hear on a system, and comfortably above the noise floor of a normal file. |
| -50 dB | Low-level hiss and hum as well. | A vinyl rip or a tape transfer, where the "silence" carries real noise that a lower threshold would keep. |
| -40 dB | Anything genuinely quiet. | A noisy live recording. Use with care and check the waveform — at this level you can start eating quiet music. |
If nothing in the file clears the threshold the tool says so rather than handing you an empty file. The waveform is drawn before anything is applied, so you can see how much dead air there actually is before deciding whether it is worth touching.
Frequently asked
Common questions
Can I trim a whole folder at once?+
Yes, and this is the tool where it matters most, because reproducible cue points are a property of a collection rather than of a track. Drop as many files as you like, set one threshold, and every file is trimmed and reported separately so you can see which ones actually had dead air. They come back as a single archive.
Does my file get uploaded?+
No. Decoding, trimming and writing all happen inside your browser tab, and the page makes no network request once it has loaded. Open the network panel and watch it stay empty.
Why do my cue points move when I re-import a track?+
Because your DJ software places its automatic cue at the first sound above a threshold, and two copies of the same track often have different amounts of silence in front of them. The waveform is identical from the first beat onwards but the file starts in a different place, so the cue does too — and every hot cue you set relative to it inherits the shift. Trimming the head so the file starts at the music makes the placement reproducible.
Will this cut into the start of my track?+
Only if the threshold is set too high for the material. The trim stops at the first sample that exceeds the threshold, so with the default of -60 dB you would need audio quieter than that at the head for anything musical to be lost — which is quieter than you can hear on a system. If your intro genuinely fades up from nothing, lower the threshold and add some padding.
What does the padding do?+
It keeps a chosen amount of the silence rather than cutting exactly at the first sound. Two reasons to use it: a soft entry can lose its attack to a hard cut, and starting a file at a non-zero sample value produces a click. 50 to 100 milliseconds handles both and is imperceptible.
Can I trim only the start?+
Yes — head and tail are separate switches. Trimming the head only is the common case, because the head is what affects cue placement and the tail is often a reverb or delay tail you want to keep intact.
Does this help with gapless playback?+
It helps, and it is not the whole story. A clean start and end are necessary for a seamless join, but lossy formats also carry encoder delay and padding in their headers which a player is supposed to handle. Trimming to a lossless format removes the question entirely, which is one more reason the output here is WAV and AIFF.
Why not just trim it in my DJ software?+
Because most DJ software does not edit files, it annotates them — a cue point in Rekordbox is a bookmark rather than a change to the audio, so it moves with whatever the analysis decided and it does not travel to another machine or another program. Changing the file itself is the only fix that survives everything downstream.
Will the file be much smaller?+
Usually not, and that is not the point. A second of silence at the head of a five-minute track is a third of one percent of it. If the file gets meaningfully smaller you had a lot of dead air, which is worth knowing on its own.
How long a file can I trim?+
Up to 800 MB, which is about 75 minutes of 24-bit stereo audio. Trimming the ends off a recorded set is a common use and works fine.
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