Shorten silences feature that removes all silences during playback

[ansh]

🗣 Context

I don’t know if anyone who listens to audiobooks at 1x speed unless they’re listening to fiction. It’ll be super great for us to have a smart speed toggle that simple removes all silences, umms , uhhs, etc.

💬 Narrative

As someone who loves to listen at 2x speed I want to be able to shorten silence So that I can speed up playback without it being incomprehensible

📝 Notes

It will be super useful to do this for everyone! I think it’s one of the best features ever

Design

It can be a simple toggle in the settings like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audiobook-player-smartbook/id1228166161 or can be set during playback like Overcast.

✅ Acceptance Criteria

GIVEN any audio file WHEN we are able to skip silences THEN launch feature

🚫 Out of Scope

Describe what is out of scope

[pichfl]

Obviously a great feature, but also one that requires knowledge of audio processing and how to do that in Swift. Yes, others have done this before, but I haven't come across an open source implementation of this technique, so we will have to build it from the ground up.

[ansh]

This blog provides a good insight into how breaker does it with an open source GitHub repo giving an example

[ahoereth]

Another interesting read on the topic with code