Cleaning Up a Podcast or Voice Recording

From a raw recording to something genuinely listenable, in the order you'd actually do it.

This sequence follows the order that actually makes each step easier, not an arbitrary checklist. Extracting audio first (if you recorded video) gives every later step a smaller file to work with. Noise removal comes before silence removal deliberately -- background hum makes it harder for silence-detection to correctly identify true dead air versus quiet-but-present speech. Normalizing volume only makes sense once the noise and silence issues are already fixed, since normalizing a noisy or choppy recording just makes the noise louder too. Compression is the true last step, since it should be applied to the final, already-cleaned audio, not before.

Each step opens as its own tool -- download from one, upload into the next, same as any free tool on the site.