Listen to the sample first
The player below works like the app’s result screen: the switch changes track at the same position, so you compare the same words with and without the fan.
Hear the difference
A voice over the noise of a fan, cleaned by the app’s own engine. Press play, then switch between Original and Cleaned.
Listen to the gaps between phrases first: that is where the fan drops away. Then listen to the words, where the whoosh is reduced too. The sample was cleaned at the app’s default intensity of 80%, and both tracks play at the same voice level, so what changes when you switch is the noise, not the volume.
Why steady noise suits the model
A fan or an air conditioner makes nearly the same sound second after second. For a model that analyses speech in 10 ms frames, that steadiness is what makes the noise easy to pin down: whatever stays constant while the voice moves is not the voice. Noise Remover can therefore turn it down in your pauses and underneath your words alike.
In our lab test at full intensity, fan and air-conditioning noise dropped by 24 to 25 dB in the speaker’s pauses, and a low rumble like that of a building’s ventilation by 25 to 34 dB.
The catch: a fan shares the voice’s frequencies
Fan noise is broadband: its whoosh spreads from the motor’s low hum up into the range where consonants live. When it is as loud as the voice, removing it takes a little of the voice along. In the same test, a fan mixed at the voice’s own level lowered the voice by 1.5 dB, among the largest changes of any steady noise we measured, while a fan 20 dB below the voice moved it by only 0.3 dB.
The practical lesson: every step away from the fan does more for the result than any setting. How we measured.
| Noise | Noise removed during pauses, in dB | Change in voice level |
|---|---|---|
| Low rumble | 25 to 34 dB | −0.3 to −1.0 dB |
| Fan, air conditioning | 24 to 25 dB | −0.3 to −1.5 dB |
Where the noise comes from at home
Each household source has its own character, and its own fix before you press record:
| Source | What you hear | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| Desk or ceiling fan | A broadband whoosh, sometimes with a motor hum | Switch it off for the take, or turn it to blow away from you |
| Air conditioner | Airflow, plus a compressor hum that comes and goes | Switch it off for a few minutes, and record far from the indoor unit |
| Fridge or freezer | A low hum while the compressor runs | Record from another room, or between two cycles |
| Computer or console | Fans that rise when the machine works hard | Close heavy apps and keep the phone away from the vents |
| Building ventilation | A deep, constant rumble | Record at night or at the weekend if it runs harder by day |
Settings for fan noise
The default 80% suits most fan recordings, and not by accident. In our intensity test on fan noise, a 30 dB cap, close to the default’s 29 dB, removed about 2 dB less noise than full strength, and kept the voice measurably closer to the clean original.
- Whoosh left in the pauses? Slide up to between 90 and 100%.
- Voice thin, lispy or underwater? Slide down to between 50 and 70%, and judge on a sentence rather than on a silence.
- Low-cut filter: leave it on. It turns down the motor’s deepest rumble, below 80 Hz, where the voice has almost nothing to lose.
- Ready-to-publish level: leave it on too. It sets the final level on the cleaned mix, aiming for −16 LUFS and stopping earlier if a peak would pass −1 dBTP.
Recording in the same room most of the time? Set these values as your defaults in Settings, and every new cleaning starts from them.
Clean your next home recording on the phone, offline.
Free · Android 8.0 or later, 64-bit
How to record with less fan noise
- Switch it off for the take. Thirty seconds of silence from the air conditioner beats any processing; switch it back on between takes.
- Make distance work for you. In open air, doubling your distance from the fan lowers it by about 6 dB, and halving the distance between the phone and your mouth raises your voice by about as much. Indoors the gain is smaller, but it adds up.
- Keep the fan behind the phone. Turn the microphone end of the phone toward you, with the fan at its back rather than in front of it.
- Soften the room. Curtains, a rug, a sofa or a wardrobe full of clothes soak up the noise that bounces off bare walls, and the echo with it, which the app does not remove (echo vs background noise).
- Pick your hour. A building’s ventilation, the street outside and the neighbours’ air conditioning are often quieter late in the evening.
Placement, distance and room: every habit for phone recording is gathered in how to record clean audio with your phone.