TL;DR
- Google Podcasts used to offer the ability to remove gaps of silence from podcasts.
- When Podcasts was retired, YouTube Music did not offer a similar tool.
- Work on a “trim silence” option for YouTube Music was spotted last year, and the feature is finally available now.
Progress is supposed to mean improvement, right? While we’re no strangers to seeing Google transform one app into another, merging features in the process, it’s extremely frustrating when we lose some functionality along the way. Something along those lines happened when we lost Google Podcasts and users were pushed over to YouTube Music, but we’re happy to say the situation has finally righted itself.
We’re talking specifically about the ability to for podcast apps to automatically remove any lengthy periods of silence. Ideally, producers would edit those out prior to publishing their podcasts, but we have to live with the reality we have, and it ended up being a useful option to have. Google Podcasts picked up that tool all the way back in 2018, but we haven’t had a similar ability for YouTube Music.
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Last year, though, it started to look like that was changing. Back in March of 2024, evidence was spotted in an APK teardown that revealed work towards a new “trim silence” option for YouTube Music. We were hopeful that would be going live shortly, but months passed and we never saw it arrive.
Here in the summer of 2025, we nearly forgot YouTube Music was even working on this tool, but then over on the YouTube Reddit sub, user Timely-Junket-2851 shared that they had spotted the option showing up at the bottom of their playback speed controls.
Sure enough, we’ve confirmed it’s here on our own devices. After uninstalling updates and walking things back through recent releases, we can see that Google finally delivered the feature sometime over the course of the past month.
Has it been too long coming? Absolutely. Should Google have done a little more work to make sure YouTube Music was just as full-featured as Google Podcasts before shutting that down? You won’t find any argument here. But despite a few lingering frustrations, we’re mainly just happy to finally see this new ability land.
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