Import Module

Strip Silence

Strip Silence removes the silent stretches from clips, so tracks arrive in your session already cleaned. In fMusic it is configured per category: each category has its own parameters and its own on/off switch, because the right settings for drums are the wrong settings for vocals.

Pro Tools does the cutting

fMusic never edits your audio files and never trims the clips itself. Files are imported whole; after the import, fMusic drives Pro Tools' own Edit > Strip Silence with the parameters of each track's category, one pass per distinct tuning. As the tuning popover puts it: "Pro Tools does the cutting — this only sets its own Strip Silence sliders." Because the values go straight into Pro Tools' sliders, the result is exactly what Pro Tools would produce by hand with the same numbers.

Per-category parameters

The controls live in Settings > Import & Organize, in the Categories table. At the top, Strip silence for all categories is the master switch: it reads as on when every category has strip silence active, and flips them all at once. Each category row then has its own Strip Silence toggle and a tuning button that opens the parameters popover:

• Silence threshold: how quiet counts as silence, from −90 to −20 dBFS. Default −50 dBFS.
• Minimum length: the shortest stretch of silence that gets removed, from 0 to 4000 ms. Default 100 ms. Shorter gaps are left alone.
• Kept before the clip and Kept after the clip: padding preserved around each detected sound, from 0 to 4000 ms each. Default 0 ms. Raise them so attacks and decays never get clipped.

Each parameter has a slider and a numeric field. Apply to All (or Apply to Selected when rows are selected) copies the four values to other categories; it never changes their on/off switches. For its own silence analysis, fMusic measures the signal in 50 ms RMS windows across all channels.

Why per category

A single global setting forces one compromise across material that behaves completely differently. A threshold tight enough to clean the gaps between drum hits chops the tail off a vocal phrase; a threshold gentle enough for vocals leaves the drum tracks full of noise floor. Per-category settings mean each instrument family gets values chosen for how that material actually decays.

Where it applies

Strip silence runs on the tracks fMusic imports. In Organize it applies only to tracks you added in the editor: tracks that already existed in the session are never stripped. Like every studio default in fMusic, the settings are set once and applied on every import; the import flow itself does not re-ask.