What is your most helpful daw automation in your workflow?

Hi everyone,

I’m an aspiring voice actor working out of my home studio. I’ve been dialing in my workflow in Reaper, and I’m curious to see what specific automations or macros you all rely on to save time.

For me, the game-changer has been automating the cleanup of pauses. When recording long VO narrations, I often end up with varying lengths of silence between sentences. Manually editing these to sound natural used to take forever.

My most helpful "automation" is a specific configuration in Reaper’s Dynamic Split tool that automatically finds any silence longer than 1 second and shortens it down to 300ms (roughly a nice breath length) without deleting the room tone entirely. It keeps the pacing consistent without sounding choppy. From there I'm able to listen back and then just extend slightly the pauses that I want to be a bit longer, which typically is only a few.

Here is the "script" (settings configuration) I use if anyone wants to try it:

The "Silence Shortener" Workflow (Reaper)

1. Select the voiceover item/track you want to clean up.

2. Open Dynamic Split (Shortcut: D or View > Dynamic Split).

3. Check "When gate closes" and "When gate opens" (Adjust threshold to catch your room floor, usually around -40dB to -50dB depending on your noise floor).

4. Uncheck "Split selected items".

5. Scroll down to the "Action to perform" section.

6. Select: "Replace silence..." (or "Reduce silence" in newer versions).

7. Check "Reduce silence".

8. Configure the logic:

   1. When silence is more than: 1000 ms (This targets only the long pauses).

   2. Reduce silence to: 300 ms (This standardizes the gap).

   3. Pad: 100 ms (Optional: adds a tiny buffer so it doesn't cut too abruptly).

9. Click Process.

It saves me about 20 minutes of editing per hour of audio.

What about you? Do you have a specific macro, script, or logical editor preset that saves you from the boring stuff?