Strip Silence

A beta Ableton Live Extension that scans selected audio tracks in the Arrangement view and automatically clears out silent regions, so you don't have to manually trim dead air from every clip.

Strip Silence is an Ableton Live Extension for cleaning up recorded or bounced audio by detecting and removing silent stretches from selected tracks within an arrangement selection.

Built to remove the repetitive task of manually zooming in and trimming silence at the heads/tails (and gaps) of recorded audio: select a time range on one or more audio tracks, run the command, and the Extension analyzes the audio and clears the silent parts automatically.

Features

• Noise-gate style silence detection: any sample at or above a configurable amplitude threshold counts as "audio," and silent runs longer than a minimum duration get flagged for removal.
• Works across multiple selected audio tracks in one pass.
• Safety padding on both sides of every detected silent gap (default 25 ms), so quiet early transients and word tails aren't accidentally clipped.
• All clip-clear operations stay strictly within your time selection — nothing outside the selected range is ever touched.
• Headless in this beta — no settings dialog yet; all tuning is done via a project-level .strip-silence.json config file, including safetyMilliseconds.
• Runs as a single Live transaction, so the whole pass can be undone in one step.
• Limitation: it does not currently expose an in-app UI for adjusting settings — you must edit the JSON config file directly.
• Limitation: silence detection is amplitude/noise-gate based only in this beta (no RMS/windowed detection yet, even though those config fields exist).

Requirements

This Extension currently requires:

• Ableton Live 12 Suite Beta (minimum version TBD) or later
• macOS tested (Tyler's M-series MacBook Pro); Windows not yet tested
• The packaged extension file: Strip-Silence-0.0.2.ablx

[!IMPORTANT] Ableton Extensions are currently part of Ableton Live's public beta workflow. They do not work in Live Standard, Intro, Lite, or earlier Live versions. You do not need the Ableton Extensions SDK or Node.js just to install and use the .ablx file. Ableton Extensions FAQ

More on Ableton Extensions

Want to learn more about what Ableton Extensions are or how to build your own?

• Read about Extensions on Ableton.com
• Explore the Extension SDK
• Join Ableton's Discord to connect with other users and developers

Disclaimer

This project was developed with help from AI tools, which assisted with parts of the code, troubleshooting, and documentation. I remain responsible for the design, testing, and final decisions, but it may not be written in the most elegant way.

If AI-assisted development isn't your thing, no hard feelings at all. Thanks for giving it a look anyway.

Installation

1. Download Strip-Silence-0.0.2.ablx from this repository's Releases page.
2. Open Ableton Live 12 Suite Beta.
3. Open Settings/Preferences:
   • macOS: press Cmd + ,
   • Windows: open Options → Preferences
4. Select Extensions.
5. Drag Strip-Silence-0.0.2.ablx into the Extensions settings page.
6. Restart Live when prompted.

For normal use of the installed .ablx, make sure Developer Mode is turned off.

How to Use

1. Go to the Arrangement view.
2. Select one or more audio tracks and make a time selection covering the region you want cleaned up.
3. Right-click the selection.
4. Choose Extensions → Strip Silence.
5. (Optional, beta only) Edit .strip-silence.json in your project folder beforehand to tune thresholds — there is no in-app prompt yet.
6. The Extension analyzes the selection and clears detected silent regions automatically.

Ableton renders each selected track's pre-FX audio, analyzes it for silence, then clears the silent ranges from the arrangement in one transaction, track by track. Every cut stays inside your selection, with a small safety pad left around the remaining audio.

Configuration (beta)

Since this beta has no settings UI, create a .strip-silence.json file in your project folder to tune behavior:

{
  "sampleThreshold": 0.0001,
  "minSilenceDuration": 0.02,
  "safetyMilliseconds": 25,
  "headPaddingMs": 8,
  "tailPaddingMs": 25,
  "windowSize": 512,
  "rmsThreshold": 0.001
}

• sampleThreshold — linear amplitude threshold; anything above this counts as audio. To convert from dB: amplitude = 10^(dB/20) (e.g. -60 dB ≈ 0.001).
• minSilenceDuration — minimum length (in seconds) a quiet stretch must be to count as silence.
• safetyMilliseconds — default padding preserved on both sides of every detected silent gap (default 25). Fully respected by the detector as of v0.0.2.
• headPaddingMs — quiet lead-in kept before each remaining clip's first sound (tighter values like 5–10 ms suit percussive material). Overrides safetyMilliseconds for that side when set.
• tailPaddingMs — quiet decay kept after each remaining clip's last sound. Overrides safetyMilliseconds for that side when set.
• windowSize, rmsThreshold — reserved for future RMS-based detection; not used by this beta's noise-gate logic yet.
• Advanced (optional): edgeToleranceSeconds, tailEpsilonMs, snapThresholdBeats, startSnapMillis — fine-tune how detected silences near the edges of your selection snap flush to the selection bounds.

If the file is missing or invalid, built-in defaults are used.

Example workflow

Say you recorded a vocal take with a few long gaps between phrases and want to quickly tighten it up before comping.

1. Select the vocal track and drag a time selection over the whole take.
2. Right-click → Extensions → Strip Silence.
3. The Extension renders the audio, detects the silent gaps between phrases, and clears them out.
4. The clip(s) update in place, with silence removed and a small safety pad left around each phrase:

[Before] |----phrase----silence----phrase----silence----phrase----|
[After]  |----phrase----phrase----phrase----|

5. Zoom in to check the edges of each remaining phrase for any leftover slivers (a known beta issue).
6. If a threshold was too aggressive or too lenient, adjust .strip-silence.json and re-run on a fresh copy of the clip.

This saves the manual work of scrubbing through a long take and slicing out every silent gap by hand.

Undo

The whole strip-silence operation is performed as one Ableton Live transaction.

Press:

• macOS: Cmd + Z
• Windows: Ctrl + Z

...once to restore the affected clips from that run.

Safety

Strip Silence changes only the clips within the tracks and time range you selected when you ran the command. As of v0.0.2, every clear operation is strictly clamped to the selection — including cleanup passes near the end of the range.

It does not change:

• Tracks or clips outside the selected time range
• Tracks that weren't included in the selection
• Clip gain, effects, or routing
• Tempo or arrangement markers
• Any MIDI tracks or clips
• Project-level settings outside of .strip-silence.json

Still, as with any tool that changes a Live Set, test it first in a duplicate or saved version of an important project — this is a beta build with known edge cases around clip-end slivers.

Troubleshooting

I do not see "Extensions" in the right-click menu

Check all of the following:

• You are running Ableton Live 12 Suite Beta (minimum version TBD) or later
• You installed the .ablx file in Settings/Preferences → Extensions
• You restarted Live after installation
• Developer Mode is off when using the packaged .ablx
• You are in the Arrangement view, not Session view
• You have an audio track and a time selection made — Strip Silence won't appear without both

Extensions are context-sensitive: Live only shows them when the selected item matches the Extension's supported context.

I installed it but an older version appears to run

Remove the old version from Settings/Preferences → Extensions, install Strip-Silence-0.0.2.ablx, then restart Live.

I still see a tiny sliver of audio/silence at the start or end of a clip

This is a known beta issue (~4ms) caused by host beat↔time rounding. Try adjusting safetyMilliseconds or edgeToleranceSeconds in .strip-silence.json, and note it may not be fully resolved in this build.

Can I use this in Live Standard, Intro, or Lite?

No. The Ableton Extensions public beta currently requires Live 12 Suite Beta (minimum version TBD) or later.

Building From Source

If you want to edit or develop the Extension yourself:

npm install
npm start

Build an installable package with:

npm run package

This produces an .ablx file in the project folder.

Development requires the Ableton Extensions SDK, Node.js, and a compatible Ableton Live 12 Suite Beta installation. See the official Ableton Extensions SDK documentation.

Version History

v0.0.2-beta

• Added: separate padding controls — headPaddingMs (lead-in before each kept clip) and tailPaddingMs (decay after each kept clip). Both fall back to safetyMilliseconds, so existing configs keep working.
• Fixed: safety padding (safetyMilliseconds) now preserves audio on both sides of every detected silent gap — previously only one side was padded.
• Fixed: safetyMilliseconds from .strip-silence.json is now actually passed to the silence detector; previously it was parsed but silently ignored.
• Fixed: removed a duplicate, backwards-applied padding pass that could delete a few milliseconds of audio just before each gap (it also mixed seconds/beats units).
• Fixed: all clip-clear operations are strictly clamped to the selected time range — the tail-clear cleanup can no longer delete anything beyond the selection end.
• Unchanged: single-transaction undo behavior, descending clear order, and the noise-gate detection algorithm.

v0.0.1-beta

• Initial beta release.
• Noise-gate style silence detection (computeSilenceRanges) with configurable amplitude threshold and minimum silence duration.
• Headless operation via .strip-silence.json config (no in-app settings UI yet).
• Safety padding and extra tail-clear logic to reduce rounding artifacts at clip boundaries.
• Known issue: small (~4ms) visual slivers may remain at sliced clip starts in some host/clip combinations.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Credits

Built by Tyler W. Supernor with the Ableton Extensions SDK.

Silence-detection logic drafted with AI (Copilot) assistance and refined by hand.

Ableton Live is a trademark of Ableton AG. This project is an independent community tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ableton AG.