I don’t know how many podcast hosts are re-encoding audio, but I’ve just learnt the magic of ffmpeg’s silence detection. Within your ffmpeg command...
`-af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB:stop_periods=1:stop_duration=0:stop_threshold=-50dB`
This removes silence from the beginning and end of files; my daily file always ends with a little jingle which has quite a bit of silence at the end of it. This audio filter automatically removes it. Given three seconds of silence at the end, if I have 2,000 downloads at 128kbit/s that’s 120MB of data saved. Every little helps, as they say.
James Cridland
npub1g5…9t5sr
2026-03-03 23:34:55 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1g5h6rwmps922vx6m3rfj23r9wlkkp9dzrwefuyzfkjktqnfwvxasc9t5srSeen on
wss://relay.ditto.pubPublished at
2026-03-03 23:34:55 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "I don’t know how many podcast hosts are re-encoding audio, but I’ve just learnt the magic of ffmpeg’s silence detection. Within your ffmpeg command...\n\n`-af silenceremove=1:0:-50dB:stop_periods=1:stop_duration=0:stop_threshold=-50dB`\n\nThis removes silence from the beginning and end of files; my daily file always ends with a little jingle which has quite a bit of silence at the end of it. This audio filter automatically removes it. Given three seconds of silence at the end, if I have 2,000 downloads at 128kbit/s that’s 120MB of data saved. Every little helps, as they say.",
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