A video with background noise loses viewers in the first minute. A fan, passing traffic or a humming fridge sits under the voice, and it is what people notice first. You can take most of it out after recording, on your own computer, without uploading the file anywhere.
This guide cleans the audio track of a finished video, step by step: get the audio out, remove the noise, put it back. Gleam Audio does the cleanup. It runs offline, and it is free for personal use up to 20 files a week.
What you need
- The video file, the final cut or a rough one.
- Gleam Audio for macOS, Windows or Linux. The app brings everything it needs, so there is nothing else to install.
- The editor you cut the video in, for the first and last steps.
1. Pull the audio out of the video
Gleam Audio works on audio files, not video, and that is fine: the noise lives in the audio track. The picture is never touched.
In your editor. Export the audio track as a file. Every editor has this: it sits under Export or Share, or you can select the audio on the timeline and export just that. WAV is the cleanest source to hand over.
From a terminal. No editor handy? ffmpeg pulls the track out without recompressing it:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vn -c:a pcm_s16le video-audio.wav-vn drops the video stream, and pcm_s16le writes the audio as a plain WAV.
2. Remove the noise
Open Gleam Audio and drop video-audio.wav on the window, or click Open Files. Remove noise is the first tool in the sidebar. Pick it, then set Strength. Start low and raise it only until the quiet gaps between words are clean.
In version 1.1.0 every file in the list has a play button and a seek bar, so you can hear the before and after without leaving the window. Your originals are never changed, so compare two Strength settings and keep the one that sounds natural.
3. Even the level while you are here
Worth doing if the audio is quiet or jumps between cuts. Enhance evens out the loudness and picks the level by destination. For YouTube and most social feeds, the Music streaming preset lands near −14 LUFS, the neighborhood those platforms normalize to. The LUFS explainer covers what that number means.
4. Put the audio back
In your editor. Delete the old audio from the timeline and drop the cleaned file in its place, or use the track’s replace option. The cleaned file keeps the recording’s length and timing, so it sits exactly where the old track sat. Still, check one sync point: a lip flap or a clap near the start, and one near the end.
From a terminal. Put the cleaned audio back into the original video:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i video-clean.wav -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 \ -c:v copy -c:a aac -b:a 192k -shortest video-final.mp4-map 0:v:0 takes the original video stream and copies it without re-encoding. -map 1:a:0 takes the cleaned audio, and -c:a aac encodes it for playback. -shortest ends the file where the video ends.
5. Listen to the finished file
Play the exported video on headphones and watch a minute of it without staring at the screen. Your eyes fill in what your ears should catch. If one spot still sounds off, clean that section again and swap it in.
When it won’t help
- Music in the video. Remove noise is trained on speech. On music it can take out more than you want, so use a lower Strength or skip noise reduction altogether.
- A clipped or ruined take. Clipping removes the top of the waveform, and no cleanup rebuilds it. Fix the mic and the room before recording; the pre-upload checklist covers that side.
- Live calls and streams. Gleam Audio works on files after recording. It cannot clean a call in real time.
- The video itself. It is an audio app, so cuts, titles and color stay in your editor.
For the same cleanup on plain audio files, the voice recording guide goes deeper into the controls and results.
Takeaways
- Export the audio track first; Gleam Audio cleans audio files, not video.
- Remove noise with the lowest Strength that quiets the gaps between words.
- Use Enhance while the file is open if the level jumps or sits too low.
- The cleaned file keeps the recording’s length, so it drops back into the timeline in place.
- Listen to the finished video on headphones before you upload.