Remove background noise from audio
Fans, hiss and hum taken out from under a voice.
Drop files here
or click to choose from your deviceAccepted: MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, OGG, OGA, OPUS, FLAC, WEBA
Up to 3 files per runUp to 150 MB per file5 runs per dayRemove limits with Pro✓ Works offline
Your files stay on your device
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and you can even turn off your internet connection before you start.
Example
Example: a 40-minute talk with a projector fan humming under it, cleaned for a podcast
A local history society recorded a 40-minute talk in the village hall on a phone (talk.m4a, mono). The projector fan hums under the whole recording. Settings: Strength Standard, Save as MP3, Bit rate 128 kbps for the podcast feed.
- The recording is converted to 48 kHz and run through RNNoise. A stereo file has its two channels cleaned separately; this mono one stays mono.
- Standard mixes 20 % of the original back under the cleaned sound, so the speaker still sounds like herself while most of the hum goes. Strong would give the cleaned sound alone.
- Press Remove noise, listen to the result on the page and download talk-clean.mp3. It is exactly as long as the original, so edits planned against the old times still line up.
| Save as | About this size for 40 minutes, mono |
|---|---|
| MP3, 64 kbps | 19.2 MB |
| MP3, 128 kbps | 38.4 MB |
| MP3, 192 kbps (default) | 57.6 MB |
| WAV (16-bit, 48 kHz) | 230.4 MB |
talk-clean.mp3, about 38 MB, with the fan gone from under the voice. Questions from the audience, a door banging or people chatting at the back stay as they were: the noise remover takes out steady sound, not other voices.
How it works
- Drop one or more recordings onto the box: MP3, M4A, WAV and others.
- Leave the strength on Standard for a natural voice, or choose Strong for very noisy recordings.
- Keep the original format or choose another.
- Select Remove noise, listen to the result and download it.
Frequently asked questions
- What kind of noise does it remove?
- Steady background noise: a fan, air conditioning, hiss, the hum of mains power, road rumble. We measured it on recordings mixed with six kinds of noise: for all the steady ones the speech came out clearer and easier to understand. It is made for speech; music comes out damaged.
- What can it not do?
- Separate one voice from other voices. With people talking in the background it made things worse in our tests, and it cannot remove music, a dog barking or other sounds that change a lot. It also marks a recording that is already clean, so use it only where there is noise.
- Standard or strong?
- Standard keeps a fifth of the original sound under the cleaned one, which keeps the voice natural and still removes most of the noise; in our tests it gave the best results on clean and noisy speech alike. Strong removes the most noise, at the cost of a slightly processed sound.
- Can I clean a long WAV recording on the free plan?
- Up to 150 MB a file. CD-quality stereo WAV (44.1 kHz, 16-bit) runs at about 10.6 MB a minute, so roughly 14 minutes fits; the same recording as an MP3 at 128 kbps is under 1 MB a minute, so well over two hours fits. Convert a long WAV with the audio converter first.
- Can it clean the sound of a video?
- Not on this page, which takes audio files. Remove background noise from video uses the same noise remover on a video’s soundtrack and keeps the picture in sync.
- Is my recording uploaded, and what are the free limits?
- Nothing is uploaded. The free plan allows 3 files of up to 150 MB per run and 5 runs a day. Pro removes these limits. The noise remover (about 5 MB) downloads once, the first time.