Almost all the noise that ruins a home or outdoor take is one of three things: wind hitting the mic, hum from the mains, or hiss from the preamp. They sound different, come from different places and are removed in different ways, so a single "noise reducer" that treats them all the same ends up eating the music. Clean Your Take works out which of the three your file has, tells you, and applies only what's needed.
You upload the take and it already plays clean, no settings first. Underneath there's a 45-second A/B to go back and forth between original and clean without losing your place, three strengths, and a switch for each noise detected. If something doesn't convince you, switch it off and compare again.
Wind isn't a sound travelling to the mic: it's turbulence at the capsule itself. That's why it sounds like low thumps and rumble, nearly all below 150 Hz, and why two mics sitting together pick it up differently. The music, on the other hand, reaches both almost identically. On a stereo recorder that difference is the clue: the tool puts the low end in mono, where the instrument adds up and the wind doesn't, and subtracts what only shows up in one channel.
It has a cost worth knowing about: where a gust covers the instrument's low end, removing the wind also pulls that low end down a little, around 3 to 4 dB on average. On a voice or a ukulele you barely notice; on a bass or a full-bodied acoustic guitar, Gentle is usually the right strength. And there's a limit nobody gets around: if the wind clipped the capsule or the preamp, the distortion is already in the recording.
Electrical hum is a fixed note at 50 Hz (Europe and much of Latin America) or 60 Hz (the US, Mexico and parts of Latin America), plus dozens of harmonics on top. It's removed with very narrow filters, around 3 Hz wide, on each harmonic, and that requires knowing the exact frequency: a 0.03 Hz error on the fundamental becomes 0.6 Hz on the twentieth harmonic, and the filter no longer reaches it. The tool measures it in the silences of your take, where the hum isn't masked, and then cleans the leftover noise clinging to the harmonics that the filters can't remove.
Hiss is broadband noise: the sound of a preamp with lots of gain, a cheap interface or tape. To remove it without taking the sparkle with it, the tool learns its exact fingerprint in a stretch where only the noise is playing and subtracts it wherever it dominates the music. With a couple of seconds of silence in the take, hiss drops 12 to 18 dB in the gaps; without them, it can barely be touched without harming the music. If you're about to record, leave two seconds before you start: it's the cheapest trick in this whole process.
While the music plays it barely acts, on purpose: there the instrument already masks the hiss, and removing it would take the air out of the take. What does stop it appearing is recording with the gain set right, which is exactly what the gain staging guide covers.
Some noise can't be separated from the music with signal processing, however good the tool: a room's reverb, a conversation or traffic in the background, and heavy clipping. They share time and frequencies with what you want to keep. For those, the fix is still to record again, and the tool won't promise you otherwise.
How to avoid each of these noises while recording, and why they're cleaned in this order, is covered in the guide to removing noise from a recording.
If the take is a vocal, after cleaning it the vocal mixing guide is the next step; and if it feels thin, the saturation guide explains how to give it harmonics back without raising the noise. To check the full mix, there's the mix analyzer.
No. All the analysis and cleanup run in your browser, on your own computer or phone. The take never leaves your device, not even when you download the clean WAV.
You can clean one take a day and listen to it clean, switching back and forth with the original, without paying or signing up. Downloading the clean 24-bit WAV and unlimited cleanups are part of Pro.
If you extract the audio from the video, yes, within limits. Most phones record in mono or with mics very close together, and the method that works best needs two mics that pick up the wind differently. In mono the low gusts get tamed, but the result is subtler than with a stereo field recorder.
Because wind and the instrument's low end share frequencies. When a gust covers part of the spectrum, removing the wind there also pulls the instrument down a little: around 3 to 4 dB of low end on average. If your take has bass, kick or a full-bodied guitar, try the Gentle strength and compare.
That's the classic artefact of noise reduction pushed too far: the leftover noise turns into tiny bursts. Drop to Gentle or switch hiss off and keep only what really bothers you. A bit of background noise sounds far more natural than an artificial silence.
WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, M4A and OGG, mono or stereo, up to 10 minutes on a computer and 5 on a phone. The clean take keeps the original sample rate of a WAV or FLAC file.