In 2023, Google announced that YouTube Music was preparing to become the new home of podcasts for Google users, replacing Google Podcasts. Under this transition, in addition to dedicated features such as downloads and background playback, the development team of the Mountain View giant is working to implement “Trim Silence” within the app, a highly requested feature that will allow to automatically skip silent parts within podcast episodes.
Cut the Silences feature on YouTube Music seems close
Trim Silence (or Strip Silence) is a feature present in most apps that allow podcast playback that allows you to remove segments of silence from an episode, making listening more fluid and pleasant. This feature analyzes the podcast audio by identifying pauses longer than a certain interval (usually 1-2 seconds) and cuts them automatically, without altering the content.
Many listeners appreciate the Cut Silences function because it allows you to save time, especially in podcasts that contain many pauses or moments of silence between one sentence and another; furthermore, removing empty audio also optimizes the use of your smartphone’s memory, as podcast files are lighter.
By analyzing the code of version v6.43.52 of the YouTube Music app, colleagues from the 9to5Google site discovered that the development team is working to bring the Cut Silences function to Google’s music streaming platform as well. At the moment there are still no details on how exactly the feature will work, but it is likely that it will follow what has already been seen on competing apps such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Pocket Casts.
The user should have the possibility to activate or deactivate Trim Silence in the app settings and to adjust the silence threshold, i.e. the minimum duration of pauses to be removed (e.g. 1 second, 1.5 seconds, 2 seconds). It is not clear whether the function will be active by default or whether it will have to be enabled manually.
Furthermore – but this is only a guess, at least for the moment – an option could be implemented to manually skip the silent parts, perhaps with forward/backward buttons of 10-30 seconds as is already done for music. This would allow for more “granular” control over podcasts, allowing you to also skip any advertising breaks.
Below you can see the code strings that suggest adding this functionality to YouTube Music:
<string name=”trim_silence_label”>Trim silence</string>
<string name=”trim_silence_description”>Skip stretches of silence during episodes</string>