How to remove background noise from audio.

Know what kind of noise you have

• Steady noise, such as a fan, an air conditioner, a computer or a hum, is the easiest to remove.
• Echo, the hollow sound of an empty room, can be reduced but is better prevented with soft furnishings.
• Uneven volume, where one speaker is louder than another or you move away from the microphone, can be evened out.
• Sudden noises that happen while someone is speaking, such as a door or a cough, are the hardest to remove.

Prevent what you can

• Switch off fans, air conditioners and notifications before you record.
• Record in a room with curtains, a sofa or a bed: soft surfaces absorb echo.
• Keep the microphone about a hand’s width from your mouth, and keep it there.
• Do a ten-second test recording and listen with headphones before the real one.

Clean it up in your browser

Open the Voice Enhancer, add your recording and press enhance. It removes background noise and echo, evens out the volume and sets the loudness, then you can listen to the result and download it. It runs in your own browser, so the recording is not uploaded to our servers.

The Voice Enhancer is free and unlimited for everyone with an account, with or without a plan. Each recording can be up to 30 minutes long.

What it cannot do

A cleaning tool improves a recording; it cannot rescue every one. A very noisy recording, speech that was never clear, or noise that sounds like a voice may still be audible afterwards. If the result sounds odd, compare it with the original and, if you can, record again with the fixes above.

After the clean-up

A clean recording is also the best starting point for cloning a voice or for mixing with generated speech in a video (see text to speech for YouTube).