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

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.comHappy to answer anything in replies, please get in touch!

43 points by terranivium - 28 comments

28 Comments

akx [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
the core part of this is understanding the needs of audio professionals and their workflow.
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins ago
the notices are available within the app, i'll make a note that these should also be publicly listed on the repo
tene80i [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins ago
the initial idea came from exporting lines and multiple takes for video game voice over delivery, but the functionality is there for doing longer clips too by making longer text selections. i'd love to get some feedback from this group if you'd like to discuss further? wesley@vocalslice.com
dipanshuhappy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Is it open source ? Curious if there is a breakdown on how it works. Looks really cool
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
x______________ [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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).
andai [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I want to add, because I see this here almost every day, that making something a subscription is totally fine, regardless of updates.

I can offer something for free that costs me money, or I can charge money for something that costs me nothing.

"If I pay money for this, I want someone to suffer for an amount of time proportional to the amount and frequency paid" is not a healthy or helpful attitude in my opinion. (It is, however, the basis of most employment, which explains the constant confusion on this matter.)

Anyway, just want to say that you don't need to change your business model to satisfy people who complain on forums, and you don't need to justify the price or business model with your work or time or suffering. The value of the product is sufficient!

jhvkjhk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Is it a whisper wrapper? Or does it use custom-trained models?
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
kunaaldhawan1 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Cool idea. But I wonder if the text to speech is 100% accurate when that step takes place
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
pulkas [3 hidden]5 mins 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

andai [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Which part of this exactly looks like slop to you?
GaryNumanVevo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
flagging is entirely driven by user's flagging a post
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Cassette Boy would love this.
PatilNitor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
How can we use this for YouTube?
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
utilitydelta [3 hidden]5 mins ago
so it's for selecting cuts that make it into a video for example?
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
gnoll_of_gozag [3 hidden]5 mins ago
can you make youtube poops with it?
terranivium [3 hidden]5 mins ago
100% it is encouraged!