Does it keep both voices? Yes, when you take turns
An interview has two voices, but rarely at the same moment, and that is what makes it a good fit for cleaning. Noise Remover keeps what sounds like speech and turns down the rest, so the interviewer and the interviewee both come through. In our lab test at full intensity, on an interview where two speakers took turns, one of them 6 dB quieter than the other, with fan noise 10 dB below the voices, each speaker came out only 0.3 to 1.1 dB quieter than in the original (how we measured).
Overlap is the exception. When both people talk at once, the cleaning cannot tell which voice matters: in the same test, a second voice talking over the speaker was reduced by only 0.4 to 1.6 dB, so both stay in the cleaned file. A café full of chatter is worse: it came down by 5.3 to 11.1 dB, and the speaker dropped by 0.3 to 2.8 dB.
- Ask one question at a time, and let each answer finish before the next one.
- Nod instead of saying “mm-hm” while the other person speaks.
- Pick the quietest corner over the nicest view: people talking nearby stay in the recording.
| Noise | Noise removed during pauses, in dB | Change in voice level |
|---|---|---|
| Broadband noise | 26 to 39 dB | −0.3 to −0.9 dB |
| Traffic | 24 to 37 dB | −0.1 to −0.3 dB |
| Wind gusts | 19 to 27 dB | −0.3 to −1.3 dB |
| Not what it is made for | ||
| Crowd chatter | 5 to 11 dB | −0.3 to −2.8 dB |
| Another voice | 0 to 2 dB | +0.2 to −0.6 dB |
Where to put the phone
Sitting down
Lay the phone flat on the table between you, a little closer to the person being interviewed, since their words are the ones you will quote. Slide a folded scarf or napkin under it so knocks on the table don’t travel into the microphone, and turn on do-not-disturb so a call or a notification sound doesn’t cut in. Noise Remover needs no connection to clean the recording afterwards.
Standing in the street
Hold the phone like a microphone, its bottom edge (where most phones have their main microphone) 15 to 20 cm (6 to 8 in) from the speaker’s mouth, and bring it back to yourself for each question. Stand with your back to the traffic or the wind, so your bodies shield the microphone.
Noise Remover handles traffic and wind well. What it cannot rescue is a voice buried under a passing bus: noise as loud as the voice leaves it thinner after cleaning, so pause and ask the question again.
For a sit-down interview, a clip-on microphone on the guest’s collar beats a phone on the table. Plug in a wired or USB lavalier, or connect a Bluetooth microphone, and choose it in the recorder before you start (Android 10 or later).
From the recording to your editor
- Record or bring it in
Record in the app, or import the file from your recorder, or share it to Noise Remover from wherever it is. Cleaning starts as soon as it arrives.
- Trim the small talk
Move the start and end handles to drop the setup and the goodbyes; the export keeps only what lies between them.
- Check the quieter voice
Play the softer speaker’s answers with the Original/Cleaned switch. If they sound thinner, lower the intensity.
- Export and send
Share the file to your editor, a messaging app or a transcription tool, or save it to your phone. It is named after the original, with “(clean)” added.
Loudness normalization raises the whole recording to −16 LUFS with one gain, both voices together, so the quieter speaker stays quieter; even them out in your editor if the piece needs it. On the free plan, the first 3 minutes of each file are cleaned; an optional video extends one file to 15 minutes, and Pro cleans interviews of any length.
Keep the original recording somewhere safe as well. Your cleanings stay on the phone and out of cloud backup, which protects them, but also means nobody can restore one you have deleted, or lost with the phone.
Clean your next interview on your phone.
Free · Android 8.0 or later, 64-bit
Sources, confidentiality and consent
Unpublished interviews, oral-history recordings, user-research sessions and off-the-record material should not pass through an online service just to lose a hum. With Noise Remover, the recording is cleaned on the phone and never uploaded: there is no account, no server to send it to, and it works in airplane mode. That is simple to explain to a source or a participant, and to a newsroom or a research ethics policy that asks where recordings go.
When the work is done, delete a cleaning from History, or every cleaning at once from Settings: the original and the exports go with it.