Show HN: Vocal Slice – Cut audio by selecting text, fully on-device

tterranivium 7 days ago 25 commentsRead Article on vocalslice.com

I make audio tools, and this one came out of the clip-pulling loop: scrub to find the right line, set the in point, set the out point, name the file, repeat.

Vocal Slice transcribes your audio, then you can simply highlight the passage you want and the waveform jumps to exactly that span. Fine-tune with the handles, export a named clip.

Windows and macOS.

https://vocalslice.com wesley@vocalslice.com

Happy to answer anything in replies, please get in touch!

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Discussion (25 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

akx•about 3 hours ago

How do GitHub's terms and conditions like using GitHub Releases as storage for proprietary binaries? I noticed the download link points to https://github.com/terranivium/vocal-slice-releases ... and the license there https://github.com/terranivium/vocal-slice-releases/blob/mai... points at a "THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md" file that doesn't exist.

unified101•about 2 hours ago

IMO, this is vibeable with tauri, with some reverse engineering of this. Worth a shot to oneshot these, fable and opus would chew through this and give a FOSS project I think in under 20$ token cost.

terranivium•about 1 hour ago

the core part of this is understanding the needs of audio professionals and their workflow.

terranivium•about 1 hour ago

the notices are available within the app, i'll make a note that these should also be publicly listed on the repo

tene80i•about 2 hours ago

If you extended this to allow assembling audio from multiple takes of the same dialogue, you’d have something very useful for audio drama post-production.

terranivium•about 1 hour ago

Thanks tene, from your comment i believe this functionality does exist, and i realise that i don't express it very clearly on my website. Essentially when you select text, it tells you how many 'matches' that text has. So if the same line is repeated, you can quickly seek between the matches to cut/AB multiple takes very quickly!

tene80i•about 1 hour ago

Great! But is the focus exporting short clips? I’m thinking more in terms of assembling long pieces of audio scene by scene, like 30+ mins. That’s a major workflow headache you could make radically easier. Depends on your target audience but you’d save them dozens of hours.

jhvkjhk•29 minutes ago

Is it a whisper wrapper? Or does it use custom-trained models?

terranivium•21 minutes ago

Vocal Slice uses whisper for the speech-to-text step, then performs its own logic on the transcription and audio, search, take matching, audio slicing, etc.

dipanshuhappy•about 1 hour ago

Is it open source ? Curious if there is a breakdown on how it works. Looks really cool

terranivium•about 1 hour ago

currently no, the app isn't open source - however the app itself announces and is quite transparent on how it functions. it takes your audio, transcribes it locally using speech to text, recording the time stamps of each word. when you select text to make slices, Vocal Slice makes use of the time stamps to align the text selection with the correct audio in and out points, matching the text you have selected.

kunaaldhawan1•44 minutes ago

Cool idea. But I wonder if the text to speech is 100% accurate when that step takes place

terranivium•34 minutes ago

Thank you! speech to text models can be extremely accurate, but it really depends on the audio you feed it. the beauty here with Vocal Slice is that it doesn't need to be perfect because the user is given the tools to fine-tine the selection via the waveform controls and listening to playback. over time i would like to solve the purely automated workflow though, and make the manual step less necessary.

x______________•about 3 hours ago

Why is an annual license instead of one-time only purchase? Do you plan on adding additional features in the future that would bloat this project or otherwise justify perpetual payment?

terranivium•about 2 hours ago

great question - I had an older iteration of this project which was a much smaller scoped utility (without the waveform functionality) that was a one time purchase on itch. The idea with this project is to add additional features over time (um and ah removal, the ability to actually remove parts of the transcription and output audio).

pulkas•26 minutes ago

I’d like to understand how this works.

This account was created only 13 days ago.

It has made only one submission, which is this post, and had only two comments before submitting it.

The post itself is about AI slop, yet it made it to the HN front page.

How does this happen?

I have an HN account that is 10 years old, but when I submit something, it often gets flagged almost immediately. So how exactly does HN’s flagging and ranking system work? Does account age or karma matter at all?

For reference:

user: terranivium created: 13 days ago karma: 18 about: vocalslice.com

GaryNumanVevo•22 minutes ago

flagging is entirely driven by user's flagging a post

terranivium•7 days ago

Thank you for the amazing support so far, a few of you have reached out via email to share use cases I hadn't thought of. This tool was originally conceived around long voice acting recording sessions which were a pain to sift through, but the privacy aspect has implications in legal and NDA scenarios too.

drcongo•about 1 hour ago

Cassette Boy would love this.

PatilNitor•about 2 hours ago

How can we use this for YouTube?

terranivium•about 2 hours ago

Thanks for your question - currently Vocal Slice only supports audio files, so you could download your youtube clip, extract the audio and run it through Vocal Slice. I have plans to natively support video in the future.

gnoll_of_gozag•about 2 hours ago

can you make youtube poops with it?

terranivium•about 1 hour ago

100% it is encouraged!

utilitydelta•6 days ago

so it's for selecting cuts that make it into a video for example?

terranivium•about 2 hours ago

Yeah that's one great use case - you could search for text in a movies audio stream and add that to a video clip for example.