Editing out silence - Cakewalk Home Studio or Goldwave?

[cyanogen]

Ok, let's say you have an audio track with a long silent section (e.g. drum track with nothing but occasional cymbal crashes, tom fills, etc.) In Cakewalk Home Studio, I can't find a way to destructively remove the silent sections. Is this possible? There is a feature called "bounce to clip", but this changes the look of waveform (and possibly degrades the audio quality). I searched the Cakewalk forum, but I came up empty.

I was thinking I could edit out the silent sections in Goldwave, but the audio track will shift. For example, if I have 1 minute of silence and then a cymbal crash, deleting the silence will move the cymbal crash to the beginning of the .wav file. Is there some way to keep the cymbal crash at the one minute mark while deleting the silence?

[Tronam]

There is a nice freeware utility called Silence Remover which can be found here:

http://www.noisetime.com/silrem.html

It supports all bit depths and can batch process a bunch of files at once. All you have to do is set the noise threshold. What it will not do, though, is *zero* the areas that fall beneath the noise threshold and maintain the exact file length. Why not use a VST gate plug-in to either achieve this real-time or bounce the output as a post process to the clip?

[jupiter8]

Or you could try Waveknife

[cyanogen]

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I may have found a solution in Silverspike's TapeIt:

http://www.silverspike.com/?Products:TapeIt