Both tools make spoken audio sound better, and they disagree on almost everything else. Gleam Audio does the work on your own computer. Auphonic does it on a server you upload to. Which one fits depends on where you want the audio to go and what the job still has to include.
Gleam Audio cleans a whole session locally
Gleam Audio runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and every file stays on the machine. It has five tools: Remove noise, Enhance, Cut, Split and Convert.
Remove noise cleans speech in one pass with a Strength slider, using a deep learning model trained on human speech. Enhance evens out loudness with presets for podcasts, audiobooks, music streaming and broadcast, and clears the low rumble a desk or traffic puts under a mic. Convert writes mp3, wav, m4a, flac, ogg and opus, and since 1.1.0 also AIFF, CAF, Wave64, WavPack, AAC, WMA, AC3 and more.
Remove noise, Enhance and Convert take the whole list at once. Cut and Split work on one file at a time. The 1.1.0 release notes add a play button and a seek bar on every file, progress with Stop, and an Activity log of everything you made.
The app is free for personal use, up to 20 files a week. A license, at a price you pick from $5, adds commercial use and removes the limit, and it is a one-time buy rather than a bill that comes back each month. The source is on GitHub under the AGPL, so you can also build it and run your own build without the limit.
Auphonic is a cloud studio for finished episodes
Auphonic is a web service. You upload audio or video, pick algorithms or a preset, and it returns a processed file. Its feature list is longer than Gleam Audio’s because it does a different job: noise and reverb reduction, an adaptive leveler, AutoEQ with a de-esser and de-plosive, and automatic cutting of fillers, coughs and silence.
Loudness is where Auphonic is strongest. You set a target, such as the -16 LUFS podcasts use, plus a true peak limit and MaxLRA, MaxM and MaxS, and it produces the file to that spec. That covers Netflix, Audible, Spotify and broadcast standards like EBU R128 in one pass. If the LUFS numbers are new, What is LUFS? explains the targets.
It also goes past cleanup. Multitrack processing balances several speaker tracks into one mixdown with automatic ducking, a noise gate and mic bleed removal. Paid plans add Whisper speech recognition with transcripts, shownotes and chapters, video with audiograms and burn-in subtitles, and automatic publishing to hosts like Libsyn, SoundCloud and YouTube, plus an API and a CLI. Auphonic’s own FAQ says processing takes about 5% of the file’s length.
Where the two overlap, and where they part
Both remove background noise from speech and both even out loudness, so the choice rarely comes down to quality alone. The split is local against cloud, and a batch tool against a finishing service.
Gleam Audio is built to take a folder of raw recordings and return clean, leveled files without anything leaving the machine. Auphonic is built to take finished tracks and turn them into a publishable master, with the loudness spec, transcript and chapter data a host expects.
One honest limit from each side: Gleam Audio’s Remove noise is tuned for speech, so on music it can take out more than you want, and a lower Strength keeps more of the room. Auphonic is a cloud service, so the audio leaves your computer before any of it is processed.
When Auphonic is the better pick
Reach for Auphonic when the job has parts Gleam Audio does not do:
- You have several speaker tracks and need one balanced mixdown. Auphonic’s multitrack algorithm handles ducking, a noise gate and mic bleed removal.
- You have to hit a platform’s spec exactly. Integrated loudness, true peak and MaxLRA targets cover Netflix, Audible and broadcast, where a preset named “podcast” is not enough.
- You want a transcript, shownotes, chapters or subtitles from the same pass, and Auphonic’s paid speech recognition produces them.
- The audio needs to be published, not just cleaned. Watch folders, the API, the CLI and direct publishing to a host fit an automated pipeline.
- You would rather not tie up your own computer, or you are editing on a machine that is not yours. Uploading is acceptable for the work.
The trade is the same thing that makes it convenient: your files go to Auphonic’s servers, and the free tier is 2 hours a month with a jingle. Past that you buy credits, either recurring or one-time.
When Gleam Audio is the better pick
Stay local with Gleam Audio when the recording should not leave your computer. Unreleased episodes, client work and anything under an NDA are simpler when nothing is uploaded, and the app works with no internet at all.
It is also the easier buy for a solo creator who cleans a batch of files each week. There is no per-minute or per-hour meter: free for personal use up to 20 files a week, then a one-time license from $5 for commercial work. And because the source is AGPL, you can build it yourself.
Some workflows use both. Clean and level the raw session in Gleam Audio, then finish and publish it in Auphonic. If the choice is between Auphonic and a transcript editor instead, Auphonic vs Descript for podcast cleanup covers that pairing, and the voice cleanup guide walks through the step-by-step pass. For a free local editor with spectral repair, see Audacity vs iZotope RX.