I have a very slow voice over recording that I need to speed up. Re-recording isn't an option, so I'm looking for a plug-in or DAW function that can partially remove the silence between words in a voiceover recording. I know many podcast players like Overcast have this functionality built-in (dynamically shortening silence to make playback faster, but natural), but I'm looking to apply it to a recording.

I'd rather strip a bit of silence before I try any speed adjustments.

I am using Reaper by the way.

Thanks!

If you recorded it at 44.1 just change the project to 48 or 96.

More realistically, does Reaper have something similar to Logic's strip silence?

Another option is to put it in a sampler like Logic's EXS24 (sorry, that's the software I'm familiar with), pitch it up and then use a pitch correction plugin so it sounds less like a chipmunk.

The only other thing is to cut out the silence manually unless anyone else has any ideas?

Something I've done in Reaper is to first tell it to not change pitch in varispeed (it's in the setup somewhere - wasn't too hard to find but I'm not in front of my computer at the moment) and use the best quality level on pitch change, then increase the tempo on the project. Going from, say, 100 to 105 has virtually no effect on the audio (and particularly on spoken word stuff) and might solve your problem.

As always, YMMV.

I discovered that Reaper does have a Dynamic Split functionality that can cut out pauses. It doesn't sound perfect, but it's probably faster than editing by hand overall.

I'm surprised there's not some sort of plugin/DAW version of any of the podcast app's "Trim Silence" functionality.

This works decently well if I use elastique Solo and set it to Speech. I do hear some occasional artifacts, but it's better than expected. I didn't know about the Speech mode until I started experimenting today.

Now to figure out how to batch process 50 WAV files as 1.2x Playback Rate. I guess Import all and Render Stems?