By Sam Ridder — I build and run CleanGrab on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.Hum, hiss, fans, traffic, a laptop droning under a call — CleanGrab pulls the steady background noise out of any voice recording and hands back a clean voice as a 192 kbps MP3 and a lossless WAV. Free, no account, no watermark, 10 recordings a day.
The cleaned file is the free file. No watermark, no trial length, no account — files up to 45 minutes. A pass adds loudness levelling and a heavier repair pass for rough recordings.
Your upload is deleted the moment the cleanup finishes. Want the strength control, or a video track cleaned in place? The full tool is on the home page.
Clean a recording, free →Long recordings arrive at CleanGrab in pieces: the upload is split into chunks rather than sent as one block. Our own error log shows what that looks like in practice — over the 31 days to 21 August, individual chunk uploads were logged taking as long as 18.3 seconds, with others at 18.2, 15.0 and 14.9 seconds, all on connections slow enough to be worth logging but not slow enough to fail. It's a deliberate trade-off: a single giant upload is faster when everything goes right, but one dropped packet loses the whole file and you start again from zero. Chunking means a hiccup only costs you the piece that was mid-flight, which is why none of those slow-but-logged uploads needed a restart — exactly the kind of quiet recovery you want from an upload bar, not a dramatic one. If a recording seems to sit there for a few seconds before cleanup even starts, that's very likely a chunk still arriving, not the tool stalling.
CleanGrab cleans up speech entirely on our own hardware. It's trained to tell a human voice apart from the constant noise sitting underneath it, and to strip that noise while leaving the voice natural. The kinds of noise it handles well:
It accepts audio and video files (MP3, WAV, FLAC, M4A, AAC, OGG, Opus, plus MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM and more), up to 45 minutes each, and pulls the voice track straight out of a video if that's what you upload.
You can remove noise from audio online free here, with the same three-strength setup used on every recording. The page can also remove background audio like hum, fans and traffic while the voice stays natural throughout. That steady noise mp3 files pick up from a laptop fan or a hallway is exactly the layer this model is built to strip out. As an audio background remover it works the same way on WAV, FLAC or AAC as it does on MP3. Think of it as a bg noise remover rather than a general audio editor — one job, done in one pass. Set the strength and the audio noise reduction runs automatically, without a manual noise sample to record first.
As a white noise remover it handles the steady hiss and static that behaves like true white noise, the same way it handles hum. You can also remove bg noise entirely on its own, without touching the rest of the mix. Noise suppression here means the model quiets everything that isn't speech, from a laptop fan to distant traffic. General noise removal from audio matters more than fixing one specific noise type, which is what the three strength settings are built around. To remove white noise from audio specifically here, Balanced is usually enough since a steady hiss reduces easily. Overall noise removal here means one upload, one pass, and a cleaned file back within seconds.
Most "my recording sounds bad" problems come down to these two. Hum is the low, steady buzz from mains electricity or a poorly-grounded cable — a single low pitch with overtones stacked above it. Hiss is the higher, airier static from a cheap microphone, a room's own noise floor, or a recording made with the gain turned up too far. Both sit constantly beneath the voice rather than in bursts, which is exactly the pattern our own model is built to recognise and remove. You don't need to know which one you have — upload the file and the model handles both.
A background remover audio pass here takes one click: drop the file in and hum, static and traffic drop out while the voice stays put. Because there's no install step, you can remove bg noise from audio online from a phone browser just as easily as a laptop. A noise reduction mp3 job works the same whether the file came from a phone or an old recorder — one pass, either way. You can remove background sound from a call recording the same way you'd clean a podcast take. Regular noise cleaning keeps a channel's audio consistent from one episode to the next, without redoing settings each time. Loosely called an audio noise filter by some, what's actually running here is a trained model that keeps the voice's natural tone instead of a fixed EQ curve.
The three strengths are just how hard the model pushes. Start on Balanced; it's right for most files. Use the guide below when it isn't.
Hum, hiss and fan drone are the usual voice noise sitting underneath a recording, and that's exactly what gets pulled out. This noise removal tool doesn't need a noise sample recorded separately first — just the file itself. Every strength tier here counts as audio noise removal free across the board, with no separate paid entry point to reach the basics. If you need to reduce noise in audio fast, Balanced is the strength built for exactly that, no other settings to check. The kind of noise reduction audio needs for a laptop fan or hallway traffic is the core job this page does. Because it's browser-based, noise reduction online here means no plugin, no account and no install.
Home recordings usually fight a fan or a bit of room hum plus microphone hiss. Balanced clears most of it; reach for Strong only if a heavy fan or AC is clearly audible, since aggressive settings can thin a voice you've worked to record well.
A recorded call picks up more than you'd think: the recording laptop's own fan, traffic through a window, someone typing notes, the hum of an old monitor. Export the recording (video is fine), start on Balanced, and go Strong if the room noise is heavy — but drop back to Gentle if voices start sounding thin, because call audio is often already compressed and doesn't have much headroom to spare.
Live-venue recordings carry room hum, audience shuffling and sometimes wind on an outdoor mic. Balanced is usually the sweet spot here: it preserves the speaker's natural tone, which matters more on a long recording than squeezing out the last bit of ambience.
| Strength | How hard it pushes | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Gentle | Up to ~6 dB of reduction | The recording is already fairly clean, or the voice's character matters most |
| Balanced | Up to ~12 dB — the default | Most recordings: removes steady noise without over-processing |
| Strong | No cap on reduction | Heavy background noise; accept a little voice thinning to get rid of it |
Every strength here is a noise reduction tool in the same sense — Gentle, Balanced and Strong just push harder in turn. You can remove background from audio calls, lectures or podcasts the same way, regardless of what made the recording. Every strength tier here is already a bg sound remover free of any watermark, with no separate paid unlock needed. To remove static from audio specifically, the model treats it the same as hiss: a steady layer sitting under the voice. Three separate noise reduction tools — Gentle, Balanced, Strong — exist so a thin voice isn't the price of quiet audio. Think of it as a noise eliminator for the steady stuff, not a tool that mutes an entire track.
Heavy room echo and reverb are a harder, separate problem: CleanGrab reduces light echo, but it will not fully erase a very reverberant room. We'd rather say that plainly than promise something the tool can't do.
CleanGrab is tuned for voice and speech — podcasts, interviews, calls, voice memos, lectures. On music or other non-speech audio the result can be poor, and the tool will tell you when it couldn't detect clear speech instead of handing you a mangled file.
It works just as well as a tool to remove noise from vinyl recordings that were digitised, and to remove background noise from recordings made on a phone. That heavier pass is the closest thing here to remove noise from voice recordings with speech enhancement free of extra cost.
An mp3 background noise removal pass here takes the same amount of time as a WAV or FLAC file — format doesn't change the process. For a call recording specifically, audio noise suppression pulls the laptop fan and room hum down while keeping the conversation clear.
Drop the file on the box above and wait a few seconds. No settings to pick, no account, and the cleaned track comes back as a download.
Steady background noise sitting under speech: electrical hum and buzz, hiss and static, fans and air conditioning, traffic and street noise, and keyboard clatter. The voice is kept natural while that layer is pulled out.
Hum is a low, steady electrical buzz at the mains frequency (50 or 60 Hz) and its overtones, usually from a ground loop or a bad cable. Hiss is higher-pitched static from a microphone's own noise floor or a badly-gained recording. CleanGrab removes both.
Yes. Export the recording — video files work too, CleanGrab pulls the audio out — and it removes laptop-fan noise, room hum, traffic and keyboard clatter from the voice track before you share, archive or transcribe it.
Heavy room echo and reverb are a harder, separate problem: CleanGrab reduces light echo, but it will not fully erase a very reverberant room. We'd rather say that plainly than promise something the tool can't do.
Start on Balanced. Go Strong if noise is still audible, or drop to Gentle if the voice starts to sound thin or over-processed. Gentle preserves the voice's character, Strong is the most aggressive.
Free with no account, no watermark and 10 recordings a day — the ads around the tool cover the hardware. Your upload is deleted the moment it's processed and the cleaned file is wiped within 45 minutes; nothing is stored or used for training. See privacy.
Yes — CleanGrab does this free in your browser. No account, no watermark and nothing to install.
Yes — CleanGrab does this free in your browser. No account, no watermark and nothing to install.
Yes — CleanGrab does this free in your browser. No account, no watermark and nothing to install.
Yes, free. CleanGrab has no watermark, no account and no credit card — upload and download 10 times a day.
Yes, free. CleanGrab has no watermark, no account and no credit card — upload and download 10 times a day.
Yes — CleanGrab does this free in your browser. No account, no watermark and nothing to install.
Yes — only the audio track changes; the video itself passes through untouched, ready to pair back with the cleaned sound.
Leave the strength on Balanced — drop the file in, and the cleaned MP3 and WAV come back without choosing anything else first.
Yes for light echo — hum, hiss, fans and traffic come out, and a light room echo comes down too, though heavy reverb needs more than this can fully fix.
Steady hiss and static — the closest thing to white noise this handles — come out the same way as hum; a truly random broadband hiss reduces well too.
Yes — an old cassette or vinyl transfer goes in the same as any other file; the noise floor typical of aged recordings reduces the same way as modern hiss.
Working with video? CleanGrab cleans the audio inside a video file and hands the video back with the picture untouched — see removing background noise from a video, or the workflow for cleaning up audio for a YouTube video.
Weighing it up against the paid tools? See the honest free Adobe Podcast alternative comparison.
Three situations have their own guide, because each one has causes and fixes this page doesn't cover: background noise in an audio file (what the three strengths change in decibels, and which noise the model simply can't remove), hum and hiss (where they come from in your own setup, and how to kill them at the source in thirty seconds), and a Zoom or Teams recording (why per-speaker tracks beat one mixed file, and what the platform already did to your audio).
By Sam Ridder — I build and run CleanGrab on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.