Cut the silence. Keep your backup.
Open Silences removes the pauses in Adobe Premiere Pro. Pick a range and your voice track, check the preview, click once. A local Rust engine finds the pauses, Premiere closes the gaps, and a verified backup of your sequence comes first.
A run in the panel
Remove silences
Estimate level automatically
Pacing
- Backup
- Audio
- Detection
- Check
- Cut
7 pauses found. 11.5 s will be removed, that is 19% of the range.
11.5 s removed
7 cuts. Backup verified: Interview - Backup 2026-10-9 14:32:7
A backup is created automatically before the cut.
Panel texts are the real ones. The interview and the numbers are an example.
One click. Nothing at risk.
Removing pauses from a talking head video should take one click, not an afternoon, and it should never risk your edit.
- Free and open source
- MIT licensed. No subscription, no account, no feature gate.
- Local
- Your audio never leaves your Mac. Premiere renders the voice tracks, a Rust engine reads them directly.
- A backup before every run
- Your sequence is duplicated into a project bin and the copy is verified before anything is analysed or cut.
- See it before it happens
- The panel shows how many pauses it found and how much time goes away. Nothing is cut until you click Cut now.
- Speech stays
- Short, loud words stay. Breaths, clicks and other short quiet noises inside a pause do not count as speech.
- Verified result
- After the cut every clip position, source range and media reference is read back and compared with the plan.
From pause to cut, checked twice.
The planner snaps every cut inward to whole frames, so a cut never reaches into speech. A second render checks the mix right before the cut.
- BackupDuplicate the sequence, verify the copy
- RenderPremiere renders your voice tracks
- Detect10 ms levels, speech regions, pauses
- PreviewN pauses, X seconds. Your call
- CutLift the pauses, move each clip once
- ReadbackCompare every clip with the plan
The detector is specified in docs/DETECTION.md: audible regions above the threshold, short gaps bridged, quiet blips dropped, air kept before and after speech.
Sixteen seconds, start to cut.
The launch film with sound. Panel texts are the real ones, the numbers are an example.
Your pacing, your numbers.
Pacing presets from Standard to Very tight set the four timing values at once. The panel speaks English, Spanish and German, and every setting stays on your computer.
| Setting | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Noise floor | -45 dB | Audio below this level counts as silence. Estimate level automatically suggests a value for your recording. |
| Silence from | 160 ms | Shorter pauses stay. |
| Speech from | 160 ms | Shorter, quiet sounds do not count as speech. Short loud words stay. |
| Air before speech | 160 ms | Audio kept before speech starts. |
| Air after speech | 160 ms | Audio kept after speech ends. |
Install the alpha.
Download open-silences-0.2.0-alpha.2-macos-arm64.zip from thelatest release and unzip it. The extension is not signed yet, so Premiere needs its developer mode for unsigned extensions once.
Premiere Pro 26.5 on an Apple Silicon Mac, sequences at 25 or 59.94 fps. Then open Premiere and choose Window, Extensions, Open Silences (Alpha).
Read the install guide# once, then restart Premiere
defaults write com.adobe.CSXS.11 PlayerDebugMode 1
# copy the panel, clear the download quarantine
cp -R open-silences "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CEP/extensions/"
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CEP/extensions/open-silences"Questions and answers.
Is Open Silences really free?
Yes. It is MIT licensed and costs nothing. There is no account, no subscription and no paid tier.
Does my audio leave my computer?
No. No network access is needed. Premiere renders the selected voice tracks to a temporary file and a local Rust engine reads it. Run evidence stays in your temporary folder under open-silences-evidence, and you can delete it whenever you like.
Which Premiere Pro versions and systems are supported?
The alpha supports Premiere Pro 26.5 on Apple Silicon Macs, with sequences at 25 and 59.94 fps. Windows and other frame rates are not supported yet.
What happens if a cut goes wrong?
Every run starts with a verified backup of your sequence in the bin Open Silences Backups. Speed changes, reversed or nested clips, transitions and locked content stop the cut instead of being guessed. If a cut fails half way, the named backup restores your edit.
Is Open Silences made by Adobe?
No. Open Silences is an independent open source project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe. Adobe and Premiere Pro are trademarks of Adobe.