A noise gate silences audio whenever the signal drops below a threshold (in dB). When you stop talking, the gate closes and the room background goes silent. When you start talking again, the gate opens and lets your voice through. It's the standard tool for tightening up live recordings and removing pauses-between-words noise.

Use a gate when there's good signal-to-noise during speech but distracting background between speech (mouse clicks, fan whir, breaths). Use noise reduction (audio-noise-reducer) when noise is constantly present in the recording even during speech. They're often used together — gate first, then NR for residual noise.

Set it just above the noise floor. For typical home recordings: -45 to -55 dB. For studio-quality recordings: -55 to -65 dB. For noisy environments: -35 to -45 dB. If you set it too high, you'll cut off quiet syllables. If you set it too low, the gate won't do anything.

It can if set incorrectly. The default attack and release times are tuned for speech — quick to open (3 ms attack) so word starts aren't clipped, slow to close (250 ms release) so word endings aren't cut. If you hear chopped audio, lower the threshold.

A gate works automatically and dynamically — it processes thousands of micro-pauses (between words, between syllables) that you'd never edit by hand. For removing one specific pause, manual editing is simpler. For cleaning up an entire recording session, the gate does the work for you.

Up to 200MB. The gate is fast — most files process in well under real-time.

Server-side tools use multi-threaded native FFmpeg running on dedicated CPUs with fast disks and parallel pipelines. Our engine is FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, which runs single-threaded inside your browser tab and has no access to native hardware acceleration. That makes browser-based jobs typically 3–8× slower than a server. The trade-off is total privacy: your audio file is never uploaded, never logged, and never stored — closing the tab erases everything from memory immediately. For most clips up to a few minutes the wait is small, and for sensitive recordings (voice memos, drafts, confidential meetings) the privacy gain is well worth it.

No. Everything runs entirely inside your browser tab using FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. The file is read into local memory only, processed in the same tab, and the result is offered as a direct download. Nothing is transmitted to any server, no account is required, no analytics are tied to your file, and closing the tab discards every byte from memory.

The file picker accepts audio inputs up to about 1 GB, which is well above what mainstream "free tier" online converters allow. The real ceiling is your device — everything runs inside your browser tab, which shares memory with the rest of the page. Most podcasts, songs, and voice memos sit comfortably under that limit even on a phone. If a very large lossless WAV or FLAC ever fails, trim it first or transcode to MP3 / Opus to bring the size down before re-running the tool.

MP3, WAV, OGG (Vorbis and Opus), FLAC, M4A (AAC), AAC, Opus, AIFF, and WMA all decode reliably via FFmpeg WASM. Output formats depend on the specific tool — most editing tools default to MP3 (universal) or WAV (lossless) but expose a format picker so you can pick the one that fits your downstream player or DAW.

Recent Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and other Chromium-based browsers all work. The tool relies on WebAssembly and SharedArrayBuffer, which require the page to be served over HTTPS with the right cross-origin headers — this site is configured correctly by default. On phones the same code runs but is slower than on a desktop because mobile CPUs are weaker.

No. The tool is completely free, requires no account, attaches no watermark, applies no usage caps, and shows no popup ads on your output. Because the work happens on your own device, there is no per-user quota for us to enforce — your hardware and browser memory are the only limits. The download is the file you would get from running FFmpeg locally, nothing more, nothing less.

No installation is needed. Audio Noise Gate runs as a normal web page, with no browser extension, no native helper, and no separate desktop client to download. That is partly a privacy choice — extensions can request broad permissions, while a regular page is sandboxed by default — and partly a convenience one: you can use Audio Noise Gate on any computer you have temporary access to without leaving anything installed on it.

Failures usually fall into one of three buckets: the input is in an unsupported format, the input is over the size cap, or the input is structurally malformed (a truncated download, a partial export, or a stream the engine does not recognise). The first two are easy to confirm — check that your file is one of MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, OGG, Opus, FLAC, AIFF, and WMA and that it is below 200 MB. For the third, opening the file in its native viewer first is the fastest way to confirm the source is intact.

Audio Noise Gate processes one input at a time by design — it keeps memory usage predictable on lower-end devices and makes results easier to verify. To handle a folder, run the tool once per file; the page stays loaded between runs and remembers your last-used settings, so the second run is essentially instant.

Inputs are capped at 200 MB per file, which keeps memory usage stable across phones, tablets and older laptops. You can run Audio Noise Gate as often as you need; every run produces a full-quality result.

Most jobs finish in seconds. Speed scales with input size and with how many CPU cycles your browser tab has available — the engine runs in your browser, so it shares resources with whatever else you have open. For inputs near the 200 MB ceiling, expect anywhere from a few seconds to roughly a minute on a typical laptop. Closing other heavy tabs noticeably speeds things up.

Audio Noise Gate is built to preserve quality wherever the underlying audio format allows it. Operations that are mathematically lossless (e.g. structural transformations, lossless re-encoding) round-trip with no perceptible change. Operations that involve a lossy codec inevitably introduce small artefacts at the byte level, but the defaults aim at the sweet spot where output looks or sounds the same to a normal viewer or listener while still being meaningfully smaller or faster than the input.

Audio Noise Gate is free to use. The processing runs in your browser, which keeps the per-user cost low enough that the tool can be offered openly. The download is the same file the engine produced — you can use it for as many runs as you need.