Remove Background Noise

Remove background noise takes the steady sound out of a recording and leaves the voice. Hiss from a cheap microphone, the hum of a fridge or an air conditioner, a fan, a laptop, traffic through an open window: all of it sits under the speech, and all of it goes. The work runs on your own device, so the recording is never uploaded, there is no account to create and nothing is charged, however long the file is and however many times you do it.

Speech is what this is for: voice notes, interviews, lectures, podcasts, narration for video. Steady background sound is what it can find, so hiss, hum and machine noise go. A one-off bang, a cough or a door is a different problem and usually stays, and music is a poor fit, because a steady instrument and steady background sound look alike from the inside.

Cleaning a recording means rebuilding the sound rather than copying it, so the file is saved again on the way out and comes back in the format your browser is able to write. An MP3 in particular cannot be created inside a browser and comes back as M4A, which plays on phones, on computers and in the usual players. Longer recordings take longer, so keep the tab open until the work is done: the page shows the progress and roughly how long is left, and you can stop at any point.