Retaining Audio in Audio Files in Matlab

Question

I’m trying to read a collection of audio files - recordings of people talking - into MATLAB. The files are in WebM format. When I try to read these files into MATLAB using the audioread() function, the resulting time series is missing pauses in speech; that is, periods in which the speaker is silent are cut out. I have tried to convert the WebM files to .mp3, .ogg, .opus, and .mp4 files (using VLC media player and ffmpeg) before reading them in with audioread(), but still the pauses are cut out. Is there a way of reading these audio files into MATLAB that retains the pauses?

EDIT:

The pauses exist when I play the file with VLC, but if I try to convert with VLC into any format, they aren't retained.

Code for importing webm into MATLAB:

ffmpegPath = 'C:\Users\rapiduser\Downloads\ffmpeg-6.0-essentials_build\ffmpeg-6.0-essentials_build\bin\ffmpeg.exe';  %ffmpeg exe path
listAudios = dir('Z:\data\files\*audio.webm');  %audio file paths array
nAudios = length(listAudios);
outputFolder = dir('Y:\IntermediateData\WAVFiles');  %wav file folder

for idxAud = 1:nAudios
    inputFile = strcat(listAudios(idxAud).folder, '\', listAudios(idxAud).name)  %input file path
    outputFile = strcat(outputFolder(1).folder, '\', listAudios(idxAud).name(1:end-5), '.wav')  %output file path
    command = strcat(ffmpegPath, " -i ", inputFile, " ", outputFile)  %command to run ffmpeg
    [~] = system(command)
end

Code to read the wav files:

listWav = dir('Y:\IntermediateData\WAVFiles\*.wav');  %wav files
nAudios = length(listWav);


for idxAud = 1:nAudios
    [y,Fs] = audioread(listWav(idxAud).folder + "\" + listWav(idxAud).name);  %reads single file
end