Jethro Jones DOT com!

Here's how to get rid of pesky silent spots in Skype (and other) recordings.

1. Open your audio file in Audacity.
2. In the menu, choose Effect, then Truncate Silence…
3. Adjust settings if needed.
4. Click ok.

So, what am I talking about? When you make recordings with Skype, inevitably, there are times when the connection is shaky and you can have audio drops. That is annoying. You don't want that. Here is a test file. This file is 45 seconds long, with a few silent spots, and the last 4 seconds in all silent.

You can see in the screenshot below that the silent spots is visible in the waveforms.

The truncate silence option in Audacity removes those silent parts automatically. It is pretty slick, and way better than what I could do editing it myself. Here is the file after being truncated. The file is about 36 seconds long, so it shaved off about 9 seconds which was all silent, and it sounds a lot better now.