Silence Finder and Sound Finder - Audacity Development Manual

# Silence Finder and Sound Finder

From Audacity Development Manual

Silence Finder and Sound Finder are two related tools which can useful to label the different songs or sections in a long recording, such as the tracks from an LP or cassette.

This page provides examples comparing and contrasting the use of the two tools.

The main difference is that Silence Finder divides up a selection by placing point labels inside areas of silence, wherwas Sound Finder divides up a selection by placing region labels for areas of sound that are separated by silence.

Here is a stereo track with six songs. The entire project is selected prior to using the Analyze functions.

### Example with Silence Finder

After running Analyze > Silence Finder... we can see that Audacity has identified the six songs, placing an "S" label just before the beginning of each song plus a seventh label at the end (as the final track ends in silence).

### Example with Sound Finder

If instead we run Analyze > Sound Finder... on the same selected audio we can see that Audacity has again identified the six songs giving them numerical labels. The labels exclude a small amount of the gaps between the songs (seen most clearly between labels 5 and 6) so the lead-in and lead-out for each song would be shorter.

## Links

> Silence Finder

> Sound Finder