Remove Background Noise

Remove Background Noise cleans up spoken recordings: a podcast with computer-fan hiss, a voice note taken next to traffic, an interview with air-conditioning drone, or a phone video with wind and room noise behind the speaker. Open the file, wait a moment, then press play and flip between Before and After to hear exactly what changed.

The cleaning is done by RNNoise, a small neural network from the Xiph.Org team built to tell speech from noise, running inside your browser. It works on 10-millisecond slices of sound, keeps what sounds like a voice and turns down what doesn’t. Around it you get a strength control, a rumble filter, a mains-hum remover for 50 or 60 Hz buzz and an optional gate that quietens the gaps between words.

Your recording is never uploaded, which matters for interviews, meetings and anything personal. Open a video and you can save it back as a video with the cleaned sound, the picture copied untouched. RNNoise is tuned for voices, so it is not the right tool for cleaning up music.

1. Press “Choose a file” or drop an audio or video file on the box. The tool reads it and removes the noise straight away.
2. Press play and switch between “Before” and “After” (or press B) to compare. The waveform shows the original in grey behind the cleaned sound.
3. Adjust “Strength”, the “Rumble filter” and “Mains hum” until the voice sounds natural. Tick “Quieten the gaps” to hush the pauses.
4. Choose “Save as” (or keep “Keep the video” ticked for a video), then press “Save clean file” and “Download”.

• RNNoise speech denoising, the same open-source method used in many video-call apps, running on your device.
• Strength control that blends the cleaned voice with the original, for a natural sound rather than an over-processed one.
• Rumble filter (60, 80 or 120 Hz) for traffic, footsteps and handling noise, and a notch filter for 50 or 60 Hz mains hum and its overtones.
• Optional noise gate with an adjustable threshold that lowers the sound by up to 30 dB between phrases.
• Before/after player that switches mid-playback, a combined waveform, and a reading of how far the background noise dropped.
• Opens MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, OGG, Opus, FLAC, AIFF, and the sound in MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV videos.
• Saves MP3, M4A, OGG, WAV or FLAC at 48 kHz, or the original video with its sound replaced and the picture left untouched.

• Start at the default settings and listen with headphones: noise that is hard to hear on a phone speaker becomes obvious there.
• If the voice sounds watery or clipped, lower the strength to 70–80%. A trace of room sound is less noticeable than a processed voice.
• Use the mains-hum option only when you hear a steady low buzz. Pick 50 Hz in the UK, Europe, Australia and most of Asia, and 60 Hz in the Americas.
• The noise gate suits talking-head recordings with clear pauses. For music or overlapping voices, leave it off.
• RNNoise can’t rescue a voice buried under louder noise, and it works on speech, not music. Record as close to the microphone as you can and use this to tidy what remains.