How to remove background noise from your recordings using Audacity

Audacity has tools for filtering out background noise.

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• You can remove background noise in Audacity with the "Noise Reduction" tool.
• Use Audacity's Noise Reduction tool on a small piece of your audio first, and then expand the range.
• No tool for removing background noise is perfect, including Audacity's, so expect some audio distortion.

If you've ever recorded a podcast, music, or a speech, you've probably had to deal with background noise. Unless you've got a professional setup, it's hard to avoid an annoying hum or hiss in the background.

Luckily, most audio editing programs include tools to get rid of that background noise. And although none of them are perfect — you should either expect some noise to remain, or for your audio to become distorted — they can help delete distracting sounds.

Here's how to use the background noise removal tools in Audacity, one of the most popular audio editing apps.

How to remove background noise in Audacity

To filter out background noise, we're going to use Audacity's Noise Reduction tool.

1. Open up your audio file in Audacity.

2. Try to find a spot in the audio where there's only background noise. The longer that moment is, the better. If you can't find any moments with only background noise, try to find the spot where it's most prominent.

3. Highlight that moment by dragging your mouse over it.

4. At the top of the screen, click Effect, then Noise Removal and Repair, and finally Noise Reduction.

Select a spot with background noise first.

Audacity Team; William Antonelli/Insider

5. Click Get Noise Profile. Audacity will analyze the selected moment to figure out what the background noise sounds like.

6. Once it's done, close this menu and select your entire audio file. You can do this quickly by pressing Ctrl + A on a PC, or Command + A on a Mac.

7. Open the Noise Reduction menu again (Effect > Noise Removal and Repair > Noise Reduction), and then click OK.

Try removing the audio without changing the settings first.

Audacity Team; William Antonelli/Insider

Audacity will use the noise profile it created before to remove all the matching background noise from your file. If you don't like the finished product, just undo it (press Ctrl + Z or Command + Z).

Quick tip: If your audio file has a variety of unwanted background noises that each sound different, you'll likely need to analyze and reduce each type of noise individually, not the entire file at once.

What to do if there's still background noise

In the steps above, we used the Noise Reduction tool's default settings. But when you opened the menu, you probably noticed that it includes a few different sliders.

If you don't like what your audio file sounds like using the default settings, then try adjusting these sliders.

The Noise reduction (dB) slider adjusts how heavily Audacity will try to mute the background noise. You want to keep this slider as low as you can while still erasing the background noise — if it's too high, you'll start muting the audio you want too.

The Sensitivity slider adjusts how much of the audio Audacity will treat as background noise and try to remove. Again, set this as low as you can while still erasing the noise.

The Frequency Smoothing (bands) slider adjusts how many frequency bands Audacity will try to reduce noise in. The default setting for this is 3, but the official Audacity manual suggests setting this lower if you're editing music, and higher if you're editing human speech.

Finally, there are two options you have to choose between: Reduce and Residue. 

Reduce is the default, and is the option that lets Audacity remove background noise. 

Residue does the opposite, removing everything that's not background noise. This is good for identifying what Audacity considers noise and is trying to delete.

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