[georgemandis]

Oooh fun! I had a feeling there was more ffmpeg wizardry I could be leaning into here. I'll have to try this later—thanks for the idea!

[w-m]

In the meantime I realized that the apad part is nonsensical - it pads the end of the stream, not at each silence-removed cut. I wanted to get angry at o3 for proposing this, but then I had a look at the silenceremove= documentation myself: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#silenceremove

Good god. You couldn't make that any more convoluted and hard-to-grasp if you wanted to. You gotta love ffmpeg!

I now think this might be a good solution:

    ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \
           -af "silenceremove=start_periods=1:stop_periods=-1:stop_duration=0.15:stop_threshold=-40dB:detection=rms" \
           -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.m4a -y

[snickerdoodle12]

I love ffmpeg but the documentation is often close to incomprehensible.

[squigz]

Out of curiosity, how might you improve those docs? They seem fairly reasonable to me

[dylan604]

if you did it in 2 passes, you could find the cut points using silence detect, use a bunch of -ss/-t/-i based on those segments, apad each segment with a -filter_complex chain the ends in concating. it would be a wonderfully gnarly command for very little benefit. but it could be done