Just thought I'd post this here as this would be a particularly useful feature for us to have.

The majority of our content at NTS is live shows in the studio, around 1-3hrs in length, and all recorded and automatically uploaded to soundcloud. Live programming runs from around 9am-12am or so.

For the overnight playout, we have a customised liquidsoap script as follows

#default = amplify(0.00001, noise())
#default = rewrite_metadata([("artist","Airtime"), ("title", "offline")],default)

archive = (playlist(mode='random', "/media/usb/airtime/stor"))
backup = (playlist(mode='random', "/media/usb/safe"))
default = mksafe(fallback(track_sensitive=false,[ strip_blank(threshold=-45.,length=15.,archive) , backup ]))
default = rewrite_metadata([("artist","NTS"), ("title", "random playout")],default)

So we have shows selected at random from the archive which are played out overnight. This is fine except for when a DJ has arrived late for their show, or if they left early, or there were technical difficulties for whatever reason and the recorded show contains some silence. We even have some shows which are completely silent in a archive of over 3000 shows and finding them and editing is an arduous task. Anyway, when there are silent shows, liquidsoap switches to the 'safe' folder which has some jingles in it, however this gets quite repetitive after an hour or so! We could add more 'safe' audio but my point is:

It would be great to have some silence detection/removal feature in airtime (in addition to the forthcoming random/offair playout) either using the liquidsoap fallback feature, or with a sox command to actually remove the silence from recorded shows. This site is a good example of the latter:

http://digitalcardboard.com/blog/2009/08/25/the-sox-of-silence/

Just an idea, and a feature that would be great to see implemented at some point!

James