Trimming the silence from hidden tracks using AI

05 January 2026

Although most people are streaming now, I'm still living in the world of CDs and MP3s. I buy CDs and rip them to iTunes, where I playlist them for work, listening out and about, and inspiration when running.

I recently picked up the Alt-J album 'This is All Yours' in a charity shop, and was intrigued to see that the last track was 16 minutes long. About ten minutes of that, though, is silence. It's one of the many albums that have a hidden track, concealed within the final track after a long silence. I understand that bands might want to gift listeners a song that they don't think is part of the main album, or might prefer to surprise listeners with a particular song. But it's an irritating listening experience having a long silence in the middle of a track. It means neither song can be playlisted or shuffled. A couple of much-loved albums by my favourite artists have the same issue, including Kenickie's At the Club and Depeche Mode's Sounds of the Universe. (That's Lauren Laverne from Kenickie pictured on the right in a photo I took when I was writing for Making Music. See more photos here.).

So, I wondered whether this is something ChatGPT could fix for me. I've been doing a number of experiments with it recently, so this seemed like an interesting thing to test, especially since I hadn't tried any audio processing with it before. My plan was to upload the MP3 file and have it split it into two separate files with the silence removed. I could then import these files back into iTunes.

It proved to be harder than I expected. There were several attempts where ChatGPT split the track into two files, but did not remove any of the silence. It seems the silence wasn't perfectly silent, so an alternative approach was used where ChatGPT focused on where the music was instead of where the silence was. At one point, ChatGPT was getting confused because it was overwriting the file I'd uploaded with one of the new files it had created. After a few goes, I thought that ChatGPT understood the problem even though it wasn't providing a solution. I asked it to write me a prompt I could use in a new chat to get the expected results. ChatGPT built some checks into the prompt and indicated how to perform the task, which helped to increase the success of the prompt. It took a few iterations in the new chat, too, but I did end up being able to split tracks easily.

The verdict, then? This is a problem that ChatGPT can solve, but the amount of iteration required isn't justified given I only have a handful of files to edit. It wouldn't take very long to edit the files manually using a tool like Audacity. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see that ChatGPT is technically capable of performing this work.

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