[LAU] How to remove buffering silence from wav files

[Nigel Henry]

Big problem for dialup users since BBC stopped realmedia streams.

Listening to BBC radio on dialup is now hopeless as both the BBC's iplayer 
(flash), and wm streams need all the dialup bandwidth plus more (48kbps), so 
what I'm doing is recording the programmes, and hope to remove the silent 
buffering sections after which I can listen to them in the normal manner.

Removing the silent bits manually, in mhwaveedit for example is going to take 
forever, so the question is, does anyone know of anything that would 
accomplish this automatically?  I can think of 2 options as below, but how to 
accomplish them.

1: Some way of doing these recordings where the recording device will pause 
for the buffering silences, then continue when the speech starts again. 
Obviously it wouldn't want to stop for speech pauses, but these are not 
completely silent as are the buffering silences. I'm using qarecord at the 
moment for the recordings.

2: Some program to run the recorded wav files through, which would remove the 
buffering silence sections.

Anyone with a brainwave for either of the above?

I'm too far away for adsl broadband on the phone lines, and a satellite 
connection for the amount of online radio I listen to would be a bit 
expensive for me.

Thanks for any help with this.

Nigel.