I ran across this discussion -- https://www.videomaker.com/forum/topic/how-to-remove-silence-from-a-video-automatically -- on Videomaker Magazine's forum some time ago. Toward the end there are some recent posts that might prove useful to you.

@JackW wow, that thread's been all over the place in the last half decade. Thanks I'll give a few of those options a try.

The Silence Detector tool of the Vegasaur does this.

https://vegasaur.com/silence-detector

FWIW, RX Elements has some really great tools too.

https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx/features/breath-control.html

Magix Samplitude has this, called "Strip Silence," which you can adjust for background noise level. Try the demo. They also have some cheaper audio apps that might have that same feature. Samplitude Music Studio is the little brother. $99. -- not sure if it's included.

None of these recommendations does exactly what the question specifically asked.

But the premise is not impossible, an advanced well written script may can achieve this, and a magician we know as wwaag (creator of Happy Otter Scripts), this may could be a walk in the park for him, lol.

@Steve_Rhoden Several of the suggestions would take one 90% of the way there. Vegasaur probably does it with the most flexibility as once regions are made a script could be written that would delete them and overlap the events by some set %

Yeah, a script could handle that last part easily.

a script could be written that would delete them and overlap the events by some set %

Sounds like a great fit for a future release of Happy Otter Scripts.

"Detect Silence" is a standard feature of Audacity, btw.

Vegasaur does both. One of it's tools detects silence and puts regions around, another one deletes the media inside the regions.

Sound Forge Pro has a glitch finder in the the Find 'menu' which can be adjusted tp detect large gaps, but it finds then one at a time and does not remove them (at least w/o a script, nor would it that useful on a video project

Marco is right. Vegasaur does pretty much everything. The nice thing is that in the first step regions are produced which can then be changed by the user. Using the Markers tool, material inside the regions (silence) can then be deleted. Using the Quick Properties tool, the resulting cuts can then be converted to an overlap.

The only thing missing would be a real-time preview after the first step which would be very useful to make further adjustments to the regions before material is removed. Regarding HOS, I have no interest in re-inventing the wheel for a silence detection tool, although an Audio Preview option might be a worthwhile addition.

Vegasaur probably does it with the most flexibility as once regions are made a script could be written that would delete them and overlap the events by some set %

After creating the markers in the silent regions with the Silence Detector tool, there are other tools in Vegasaur that were developed to complete this editing process.

I made a short video showing how I use this feature in my work.

Hi, someone just asked me about 'silence detectors', is Vegasaur  still the best option?

Thanks

@Former user try the free Jump Cutter Ultra, it's what I use.Works fine mostly, infrequently I've had desyncs with audio and video

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r4yc0SVHV3Z69EBjg-L3S1b21NzrKjsG/view

The YT video has instructions and details in description

@Former user Thankyou,

This person who asked wants to use it to remove gaps in podcasts that can be 3hrs long with many short silences