Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's Blog

Pocket Casts 5 and Remove Silence

March 12, 2015

Link: Pocket Casts 5 and Remove Silence

Silence removal helps you get through more podcasts faster by reducing the length of extended silences, while maintaining the natural pacing and cadence of your favorite hosts.Pocket Casts, my favorite Podcast client on Android (and iOS) just got a big update on Android. In addition to the gorgeous design update with Material design, it also got Remove Silence and Volume boost, aka Overcast premium features.

I tried Remove Silence on some shows, and it works on and off. It mostly works well, but for some shows with a strong noise gate (Relay.fm shows), it makes the speaker sound a bit unnatural.

Even worse, when applied to my own show in Japanese, the feature seems to eliminate all the legitimate silence for Japanese Sokuon. When I said “Matto” (for mattress), PocketCasts trimmed it to sound more like “Mato”, and I say “Sokka” (oh i see) it changes to “Soka”. Not just unnatural but makes little sense.

It’s probably due to my mixing that my track is almost noise free, but this kind of over trimming doesn’t happen with Overcast’s Smart Speed yet, so I guess there’s a room for Pocket Casts to improve on that.