LibriVox Forum

The admins believe it's time to revisit the policy on end silences.

We currently use 5 seconds of silence after files less than 30 minutes and 10 seconds of silence for files 30 minutes and longer. This was because some MP3 players (RealPlayer in particular) would cut off the recording playback before the end of the file.

Do you ever experience your player cutting off the end of recordings?

EDIT: Poll to be added, but I can't see where to do it. Stay tuned for that...

No I don't experience that.
I think the poll option got removed in an upgrade. You should see it below the text box on the first post.

As far as I've heard, players don't do it anymore, but I'm not an expert.

But I do like having the 5 seconds of silence on the end of a recording. It gives a few seconds at the end of a chapter to pause if I want to stop listening, and to think about the chapter a bit before starting the next one ... I don't know, I just like it Professional audiobooks always annoy me because they go straight from one chapter to the next without a break in between.
10 seconds always seems too long, though. If a chapter has too much silence on the end I get bored and usually skip to the next chapter. I wonder if we could revise the policy to say that all files (even the long ones) have, say, 5 seconds? And if the rule was always the same, it would probably reduce the number of times I have to tell people to fix their ending silence

Anyway, that's just my opinion. Others mayn't like the pauses at all.

I also like the idea of five seconds silence at the end of each section, no matter how long it is.

I vote 5 seconds too. I've never been able to understand how 10 seconds on a longer recording made a difference. It always seemed like, short or long, a player would react to the amount of silence the same way. I guess the RealPlayer discriminated between longer and shorter recordings.

The length of silence needed at the end came from a study carried out by MariaSC during my recording of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 2006. She noticed that RealPlayer chopped off the end of my sound files, so carried out a little experiment. Here's the page where the conversation started (her results are on the next page): viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2125&p=31736#p31736

The amount of silence needed actually varied with the length of the recording, but we decided on 5 and 10 seconds as a good approximation.

I've no idea whether RealPlayer still acts on our files in the same way now.

Peter

I think 5 seconds is good.

Peter, thank you for posting that! I thought something like that had been done, but it was before my time. There's nothing like institutional memory.

I don't have RealPlayer, but maybe someone else does.

You have a good memory, Peter! Looks like RealPlayer is still a thing: www dot real dot com, if any windows users want to try it. Looks like they're more focused on video than audio, nowadays.

Can I add to say that I like the silence at the end of a chapter. But as my player doesn't cut it off, 5s is okay.
Kim

One person voted yes, could we plaese hear details?

I would have voted against introducing the 10 seconds back then, I'm totally for reducing it now, after all why should we fix sth. that is not broken at our side?
Realplayer is only a software which can be fixed, if there are hardwareplayers that have that misbehaviour, things might be different.

Cheers
mahne

I would also vote for 5 seconds silence no matter the length of the recording. I like some silence between chapters for demarcation, but 10 seconds is a bit long.

Don

kayray wrote:You have a good memory, Peter! Looks like RealPlayer is still a thing: www dot real dot com, if any windows users want to try it. Looks like they're more focused on video than audio, nowadays.

I've just installed it, and I'm going to make some experiments...

EDIT TO ADD - Trying with a 45 minute file shows no cut off.

The specs for commercial recordings at Audible is 1 to 5 seconds, which must work for all current players. I support 5 seconds standard.