Reduce background noise

What noise reduction can and can't fix

The filter works best on steady background sound: tape and microphone hiss, the hum of a fan or air conditioner, computer noise and electrical buzz. It learns the noise across the frequency spectrum and lowers it under the voice or music. It can't remove sounds that change, such as traffic, dogs, other people talking or keyboard clicks, and it can't fix echo from a large room.

How to reduce background noise

Drop the recording above. Set the noise floor, from -50 to -10 dB, which is the level the filter treats as noise. The default is -25 dB. Press Reduce noise and listen to the MP3. If hiss is still there, raise the value toward -15. If the voice sounds watery or metallic, lower it toward -35. The filter is FFmpeg's afftdn, running in your browser.

Get the best result

Clean up before you change the level. Run noise reduction first, then Normalize Audio, because normalizing a noisy file raises the noise as well. Work from the original recording rather than a compressed copy, and keep the original in case you want to try another setting.

Before you start

Input: MP3, WAV, FLAC, M4A, AAC, OGG, OPUS, WEBM, and AMR. Output: cleaned MP3. The settings appear before anything runs, so you can check them first. Your original file is never changed.

Converting audio can change the codec, bitrate, channels, tags and length. Listen to the start and end of the result. Keep a lossless original if you may edit it again.

Keep the original until you have opened and checked the result. The work happens in this browser tab, so the size you can handle depends on your device's memory, your browser and the file itself.

Steps to reduce background noise

1. Drop noisy audio.
2. Pick the settings you want.
3. Press the action button, then download the cleaned MP3.