AIFF files: strip initial “whitespace”

Question

I have a folder full of AIFF files that have a little gap at the beginning where no sound is heard. How would I go about writing a script/tool that'd remove this gap?

Basically the files look like this in Audacity (I want to get only the selected part):

I can't really use Audacity because I have hundreds of the files so doing it by hand is not an option.

I don't care too much about the OS / language, as long as it works.

Answer 1

In the end it was just easier to hack up a quick C++ solution using libsndfile.

Feel free to steal it from https://github.com/houbysoft/short/blob/master/removeInitialSilence.cpp.

Answer 2

since you are asking on a programmer's website and have programming experience (peeked at your profile) -- if you look in the sources, you will see Audacity has some scripting support.

there are also commercial tools (e.g. batch processors) for this.

i wouldn't recommend getting your hands too dirty with this file format (i.e. writing a C program could easily take more time than doing it manually in the editor).