Turn on Skip silence in Settings and Audio Recorder – Voice Recorder pauses itself after about 1.5 seconds of quiet, then resumes as soon as sound comes back. The result is a voice-activated recording with the long gaps left out.
The switch is off by default. Under it the popup shows a short hint: "Pauses while nothing is heard". That is exactly what it does, no more and no less.
Turn it on
- Click the extension icon in the toolbar.
- Open Settings.
- Switch on Skip silence.
- Pick your source (Microphone, Tab audio, or Both) and press the big round Record button.
Settings are locked during a recording, so decide before you start. If you forget, stop the take, flip the switch, and record again.
What you will see while it runs
When the input stays quiet for about 1.5 seconds, the status changes from Recording to Waiting for sound. The timer stops counting, because nothing is being written to the file. When you speak again, recording continues in the same take and the status switches back.
You don't get a separate file per phrase. Everything lands in one recording in the list, just without the dead air between phrases.
How "quiet" is measured
The recorder watches the level of everything it is capturing. With Both selected, that means your mic and the tab together. A tab playing music in the background counts as sound, so the recorder won't pause while that music plays.
The threshold is low: normal speech at a normal distance easily crosses it. To resume, the level has to rise a little above the pause point, which keeps the recorder from flickering on and off at the edge.
A practical consequence: a noisy room may never count as silent. If a fan or street noise is loud enough at the mic, the recorder keeps going. Leave noise suppression on and keep the mic gain reasonable so the background stays below the line.
Where it works well
- Dictation and voice memos. You think, you talk, you think again. Long pauses vanish and playback gets shorter.
- Practice sessions. Reading aloud or practising pronunciation with breaks to check a word.
- Leaving the recorder running in a quiet room. Hours of near-silence turn into minutes of actual sound, which also saves disk space.
- Tab audio with gaps. A web page that plays clips with silence between them.
Where I'd leave it off
Skip silence is a blunt tool on purpose. The cost is the 1.5-second wait plus the moment it takes to resume, and that has side effects:
- Soft first syllables. When you start speaking again, the very beginning of a quiet word can be clipped. A breathy "h" or a whispered start is the usual victim.
- Interviews and conversations. Natural pauses carry meaning. Removing them makes people sound like they interrupt each other. For interviews, keep the full timeline.
- Music. Quiet passages and decays may be cut. Rests are part of the music.
- Anything you will sync with video or slides. Shortened gaps break timing with picture.
If you are unsure, record without it and remove dead air at the start and end with Trim. That keeps the middle intact.
Skip silence, Pause, and Auto-stop together
Skip silence lives alongside manual pause. If you press Pause (or Alt+Shift+P), the recorder stays paused regardless of sound until you resume it yourself. Skip silence only acts while the recording is not manually paused.
Auto-stop counts recorded time, not wall-clock time. Time spent in Waiting for sound doesn't count toward the limit. If you set Auto-stop to 30 minutes and only talk for a third of the time, the session can run much longer than half an hour before it stops. The details are in countdown and auto-stop timers.
If it never pauses, or never resumes
- Never pauses: the input is never quiet enough. Check for a tab playing sound (with Both or Tab audio), a loud fan, or a mic volume pushed well above 100 %.
- Never resumes: the recorder can't hear you. Look at the live waveform while speaking. A flat line points to the wrong device in Microphone, a very low Mic volume, or a mic muted at the system level.
- Cuts off word starts: speak a bit closer to the mic, or turn the feature off for that kind of recording.