“Trim Silence”: Threat or menace?

While I don’t think Apple Podcasts itself has a “trim silence” feature, it’s popular in a bunch of podcast players. Overcast probably kicked it off with its “Smart Speed” function, but it’s in Pocket Casts, Castro, and I’m sure a bunch of other ones. The idea is that the player “listens” for silences in the podcast and (hopefully subtly) shortens them, so you’re saving a little time even when you’re playing the podcast at normal speed.

I suspect many users always run with Trim Silence enabled. I did, until I realized that occasionally Overcast interpreted very, very soft sounds as trimmable, subtly screwing up the timing of music. No problem: you can disable it for specific podcasts, right?

Well, if you do that, you’ll learn that podcasts that I think of as “NPR style,” e.g., ones with a certain kind of production value like 99% Invisible and Pop Culture Happy Hour, actually sound pretty good without Trim Silence enabled. In fact, they sometimes sound better. They’re edited precisely—even though PCHH itself is, despite being an actual NPR production, very much the “several dudes talking” kind of show unique to the podcast form. (With the asterisk that PCHH’s rotating panel is extremely diverse across just about any demographic line you care to name.)

Now, this isn’t a unique observation; I remember chatter a year or two ago on social media that I follow from people discovering this (and making dramatic denunciations of the option). But what I didn’t expect is what happened when I listened to podcasts from folks who are part of what one might cheekily dub the 5by5 Diaspora without trim silence enabled.

(Brief aside: 5by5 was a network a decade and change ago run by Dan Benjamin, with shows featuring hosts that pod-listening Apple nerds know: Merlin Mann, John Siracusa, Myke Hurley, Marco Arment, John Gruber, and more. It was huge for a brief time, then fell apart in just as brief a time, with next to all its hosts either jumping to the nascent Relay or going independent. Someday I’d love to know the story of what happened there; reading between the lines, it sounds as if Benjamin was either difficult to work with, didn’t give hosts generous business deals, or both.)

My impression of many of those conversational shows was that even though they were relatively lightly edited, they were still edited tightly enough to take out awkward pauses. But listening to a few shows that I otherwise love without the Smart Speed or Trim Silence function at work, though, makes me question that belief. Are their creators are, consciously or not, assuming that everyone’s listening with Trim Silence enabled?

This could be a style choice, to be sure, the idea that the conversation’s going to sound more natural if you keep in the two or three seconds while a host gathers their thoughts between sentences or phrases. In a sense, it does. But I don’t think it’s the kind of “natural” you actually want in a podcast any more than you want it in a scripted show, where any long silence is deliberately written into the script. When I listen to these podcasts as recorded, I think: this could have used a little more editing.

Is this bad? No, not in the grand scheme of things. I am re-evaluating my podcast listens, in part because I don’t have the free time to keep up any more, and in part because I’m burning out on tech news in general and on AI AI AI AI AI AI in particular. Even so, I’m not going to stop listening to podcasts that I still like because of too-long pauses; I’ll just keep Trim Silence enabled for them.