I built a free macOS app that removes silence from videos and auto-generates subtitles

I edit travel vlogs in Final Cut Pro. The most tedious part was removing silence — scrubbing through hours of footage to cut dead air, frame by frame. I looked for tools to automate this, but they all split audio by fixed time windows. Words get chopped in half. "Restaur-" on one clip, "-ant" on the next. So I built Silenci — a macOS app that removes silence and generates word-level subtitles without ever cutting mid-word. How it works Most tools chop audio into chunks, run ASR on each chunk, and words get split at chunk boundaries. Silenci uses a 2-pass approach : Pass 1: Silero VAD detects speech → Qwen3-ASR transcribes → ForcedAligner produces word-level timestamps Pass 2: Split only at word end_time boundaries → never cuts mid-word The output is an FCPXML file you import directly into Final Cut Pro — silence removed, subtitles already embedded. Tech stack Frontend: SwiftUI native macOS app Backend: Python subprocess (Silero VAD + Qwen3-ASR + ForcedAligner) Communication: JSON-RPC 2