How to remove background noise on Zoom (live & recordings)

Zoom calls pick up more background noise than people expect: a laptop fan, a street outside the window, a housemate's TV. Zoom has a built-in noise suppression feature that helps a lot on live calls, but it has one limitation that trips people up: it can't be applied after the fact. If you're looking at a recording that already has noise baked in, you need a different fix. This guide covers both.

The fast way: clean a Zoom recording online, free

If the meeting already happened and the recording has noise in it, there's no Zoom setting that will fix it retroactively; you have to clean the audio file itself. The quickest way is a free browser-based background noise remover:

1. Export or download your Zoom recording as an M4A (audio only) or MP4 (video) file from the Zoom app or your cloud recording page.
2. Drop the file into CleanNoise. For an MP4 recording, the video noise remover cleans the audio track directly; if you only need the sound, the extract audio from video tool pulls a clean audio file out first.
3. CleanNoise profiles the steady background noise automatically and removes it, leaving speech intact.
4. Preview the before/after and download it in one click, with no settings. For echoey rooms, switch on Remove echo / reverb.

You can hear a free preview before paying, and your call recording is never shared and is deleted within 24 hours of processing.

Fixing it live: Zoom's built-in noise suppression

For calls you're about to join, turn on Zoom's noise suppression before you start:

1. Open the Zoom desktop app and go to Settings > Audio.
2. Under Background Noise Suppression, choose a level: Auto lets Zoom decide, Low keeps more of the natural room sound, and High is most aggressive, best for a noisy environment like a coffee shop or an open office.
3. Make sure Original Sound is switched off. When Original Sound is on, Zoom skips its audio processing entirely, including noise suppression, so a call that sounds noisy is often just a case of Original Sound being left on from a music-sharing session.
4. Use the microphone test in the same settings panel to confirm the hum or fan noise in your room is actually gone before you join.

This setting is real-time: it processes the audio stream as it leaves your microphone, so it helps everyone on the call hear you more clearly, live. That's also exactly why it can't help a recording after the meeting has ended: there's no live stream left to process, only a finished audio file.

Tips for a cleaner Zoom call

• Position matters more than settings. Sitting closer to the mic and further from the fan or window does more than any software setting.
• Headset mics beat laptop mics. A headset or USB mic picks up far less room noise than a built-in laptop microphone to begin with.
• High suppression can sound "processed." If voices start sounding thin or robotic on High, try Auto or Low; the goal is the least processing that removes the noise.
• If a recording still needs work after suppression was on, the audio enhancer can also help boost clarity, not just remove noise.

Which method should you use?

Use Zoom's live noise suppression whenever you're hosting or joining a call; it costs nothing and helps in real time. Use CleanNoise whenever you're dealing with a recording: interviews, webinars, podcast co-recordings, or any Zoom call that was saved for later use where the noise already made it into the file. Most people end up doing both: suppression on for the live call, and a quick pass through CleanNoise on the exported recording for anything that got through. See pricing if you need to clean longer recordings or process files in batches.