Is there free noise cancelling software for your mic that is any good?

The washing machine hits its spin cycle four minutes into a client call. You find the Zoom setting, drag background noise suppression from Auto to High, and the rumble drops away. So does the tail of every word you say quietly, because at that level the filter treats anything that is not loud, steady speech as a candidate for removal. You saved the call. You also paid for it in a currency nobody mentions on the download page.

That trade is the honest answer to the question in the title. Yes, there is free noise cancelling software for your mic, and some of it is very good at one specific job: pulling steady or sudden non-voice sound out from under your voice. What none of the free options do is make the voice itself clearer, warmer or more even, and most of them work only inside one app. Below are the free options a Mac user has as of October 2026, what each one does well, where it stops, and the point at which paying once is cheaper than living with the gaps.

If you are comparing paid tools as well, such as a Krisp subscription or a voice processing app, the wider roundup on which noise cancelling software actually works on calls is the better page for you. This one stays with what costs nothing.

The short answer: free noise suppression comes in four kinds

Most frustration with free noise suppression software starts when these get mixed up.

1. Built into the call app. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Google Meet on some plans, and Telegram voice chats all have their own filter. Zero setup, and it works only inside that app.
2. Built into macOS. Mic Modes, with Voice Isolation as the noise option. Also zero setup, available only where the app exposes it.
3. Built into a recording or streaming tool. OBS Studio ships an RNNoise filter. Free and decent, but it cleans what OBS records or streams, while Zoom keeps hearing your raw mic.
4. Open-source plugins you wire up yourself. RNNoise packaged as an audio plugin, plus a virtual audio cable such as BlackHole, gives you a free chain for every app. It works, and it costs an afternoon plus a tolerance for upkeep.

Offline cleanup sits apart from all four. Audacity's Noise Reduction fixes a file after recording and does nothing for a live call.

What the filters inside call apps actually do

Zoom

In the Zoom desktop client, background noise suppression lives under your profile picture, then Settings, the Audio tab, Microphone modes. Zoom's support article lists four levels: Auto (the default, moderate reduction when needed), Low (minimal), Medium (aimed at standard environments) and High (the most aggressive). There is also Original sound for musicians, which switches post-processing off and raises the codec to 48 kHz. For speech you rarely want it, unless clean processing already happens before Zoom gets the signal.

The working rule: leave Auto on in a normal room, move to Medium for a fan or a fridge, and treat High as the emergency setting for the washing machine moment. A higher level removes more, and it has less margin left to protect your quiet syllables with. The rest of the Zoom side is in the Zoom audio settings guide.

Microsoft Teams

Teams has three noise suppression levels: Auto (default), Low for persistent sounds like a computer fan or air conditioner, and High, which Microsoft describes as suppressing all background sound that isn't speech. You find it under Settings and more, Settings, Devices, or mid-meeting under More actions, Audio settings. High will strip the colleague talking behind you, which is the point. It will also strip the music you play for a demo, which might not be.

Discord

Discord integrates Krisp at no cost. Discord's Krisp FAQ says it runs on your device, nothing goes to Krisp's servers, and on a Mac it needs an Apple CPU and macOS 12 or later. Turn it on from the Noise Suppression icon in a voice channel, or under User Settings, Voice & Video, Noise Suppression.

The same FAQ contains a sentence every free-tool user should read twice: in a quiet room with a high-quality mic, you may notice a decline in voice quality, and Discord suggests leaving Krisp off there. A noise filter charges you every second it runs and only pays you back when there is noise. More detail in how good Discord noise suppression is.

Google Meet and Telegram

Google Meet's noise cancellation runs in the cloud and is tied to specific plans. Google's help page lists Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise editions, several Education tiers, Frontline, Workspace Individual, and Google One subscribers with 2 TB or more. A plain free Gmail account is not on that list. Where you have it, the switch is under Settings, Audio, Noise cancellation.

Telegram's official Telegram Tips channel says noise suppression is on by default in voice chats and can be switched off in the voice chat settings. Treat it like the rest: a filter tied to one app, with an on and an off and nothing in between.

The catch they all share

Every one of these filters lives inside its app. Your Zoom setting does nothing for the Slack huddle an hour later, the voice memo, or the OBS recording. And none of them touch the voice. If the mic sounds thin, boomy or too quiet, or it picks up the room's echo, noise suppression leaves that alone, because none of it counts as "noise" to the filter.

macOS Voice Isolation: free, decent, app dependent

Macs have Mic Modes. Apple's guide describes three: Voice Isolation, which filters out background sounds; Wide Spectrum, which includes the sounds around you; and Standard. You open the menu from the video icon in the menu bar while an app that supports Mic Modes is using the mic, FaceTime being Apple's own example, and Apple adds that the options vary by app.

That "supports Mic Modes" clause is the ceiling. Voice Isolation belongs to the system, but the app decides whether to offer it, so you can't count on it in every tool you open. Where it appears, it's a sensible first try before installing anything.

One warning applies here and everywhere else: don't stack filters. Voice Isolation, plus Zoom on High, plus Krisp in Discord does not clean three times as well. Each stage guesses what is voice and removes the rest, and each guess eats into what the next stage receives. Choose one noise stage and set the others to their lowest level or off.

RNNoise: the free engine behind many "free" tools

Search for free noise suppression software long enough and you land on RNNoise. Knowing what it is explains both why the free options are good and why they stop where they stop.

RNNoise is an open-source noise suppression library by Jean-Marc Valin, developed with Mozilla and Xiph.Org. It mixes classic signal processing with a small recurrent neural network. Instead of rebuilding the audio sample by sample, it computes a gain for each of 22 frequency bands, frame after frame. The model is tiny, 85 kB with 8-bit weights, and its author reports it running about 60 times faster than real time on an x86 CPU. The code is under a BSD-3-Clause license, and the reference command-line tool expects 48 kHz mono audio.

The band design is also the limit, and the author says so plainly. Working in 22 bands avoids the warbling "musical noise" of older filters, but it can't remove noise that sits between the harmonics of your voice. The published demo uses babble, car and street noise. A dog barking in the middle of a word is a harder case for a band-based filter, since the bark and the word can land in the same bands at the same instant.

RNNoise in OBS

OBS Studio's Noise Suppression filter uses RNNoise by default. The OBS knowledge base describes the three methods: RNNoise gives higher quality at a higher CPU cost; Speex is lighter and configurable, with a suppression level that defaults to -30 dB; NVIDIA Noise Removal needs NVIDIA's Broadcast SDK. Add the filter to your mic source and your recordings and streams get RNNoise for free.

A reasonable free chain for a voice in OBS looks like this. The gate values are the OBS defaults from the noise gate documentation, so treat the thresholds as a starting point and move them against your own level meter.

Mic source in OBS, filters from top to bottom:

1. Noise Suppression   Method: RNNoise
2. Noise Gate          Close threshold: -32 dB
                       Open threshold:  -26 dB
                       Attack: 25 ms   Hold: 200 ms   Release: 150 ms
3. Compressor / Gain   only after the two above, so they don't lift the noise back up

Suppression goes first and the gate second: RNNoise lowers the floor, and the gate then has a clean gap between the quiet room and your voice to work with. If the gate clips your first syllable, lower the open threshold by a couple of dB. The guide to OBS noise gate settings walks through finding the numbers for your own room.

The limit is where the clean audio ends up. This chain cleans what OBS records or streams, while Zoom, Meet and Telegram keep hearing your raw mic. Getting that cleaned audio into a call app on a Mac means routing it through a loopback driver, and that is the do-it-yourself chain.

RNNoise in every app, the free DIY way

There is a free path to RNNoise in every app on a Mac, and it has three parts:

• The plugin. noise-suppression-for-voice wraps RNNoise as an audio plugin in VST2, VST3, LV2, LADSPA, AU and AUv3 formats, under GPLv3. The Mac formats exist, but the README's macOS setup section still reads "TODO", and macOS is not among the setups the author lists as tested.
• A plugin host. Any app that can load an Audio Unit or VST plugin and send its output to another audio device, running whenever you want the chain active.
• A virtual audio cable. BlackHole is a free, open-source macOS loopback driver under GPL-3.0, installable with brew install blackhole-2ch. The host sends the cleaned audio into BlackHole, and you pick BlackHole as the microphone in Zoom.

The plugin's README is unusually frank about the conditions. Run it at 48,000 Hz and no other rate. Set the voice detection threshold somewhere between 85% and 95% for most cases. The retroactive grace period, which keeps the first sound of a word from being cut, adds latency. And the author warns that the plugin can't improve voice quality with a bad microphone and can make things worse by misclassifying voice as noise.

So the DIY chain really is free, it reaches every app, and it gives you exactly one thing: RNNoise. In exchange you become the maintainer of a host app that has to be running, a sample rate that has to stay at 48 kHz, and a virtual device that has to stay selected in every app. When a macOS update lands or a USB mic gets unplugged, debugging the chain is your job. For what a virtual mic is and why a Mac needs one for this, see what a virtual microphone is.

Free cleanup for recordings, not calls

If you're fixing a podcast take or a voice-over file rather than a call, the question changes. Audacity's Noise Reduction (Effect, Noise Removal and Repair, Noise Reduction) works in two passes: select a stretch of pure room noise and click Get Noise Profile, then select the whole take and apply. It handles constant hum and hiss best, and it struggles with irregular noise or with a voice that isn't much louder than the noise. It doesn't run in real time, and the noise profile is gone once you close Audacity. Leave five seconds of silence at the start of every take and this free tool has something to learn from.

What about NVIDIA Broadcast and Krisp?

Two names come up in every thread about free noise cancelling software, and on a Mac neither one is the answer.

NVIDIA Broadcast is free, and its Noise Removal targets keyboard typing, fan noise and mic static. It is a Windows app, though, and needs a GeForce RTX 2060, Quadro RTX 3000, TITAN RTX or better. There is no Mac version, and what Mac users run instead has its own page.

Outside Discord, Krisp is a paid product. As of October 2026, Krisp's pricing page offers a 7-day free trial, then the Core plan at $16 per user per month, or $8 per month billed annually. Unlimited noise cancellation comes bundled with a meeting assistant that transcribes and takes notes. If the noise part is all you want, that's $96 a year for one feature. Whether the rest earns its keep is the subject of is Krisp worth paying for on a Mac.

Where free tops out

After all of that, here is what a free stack on a Mac still does not fix:

• Your voice still sounds like your mic. Noise suppression removes sound that isn't voice. A thin built-in mic, a boomy USB condenser, a quiet headset or a voice that fades when you lean back are tone, level and distance problems, and a noise filter isn't built to touch them.
• Room echo is a separate problem. Reverb off bare walls is your own voice arriving late, and a filter trained to keep voice will mostly keep it.
• One app at a time. The zero-setup options stop at the app's edge, and the option that reaches every app costs an afternoon plus upkeep.
• Stacking hurts. Two filters guessing in a row cost more than one.

Does any of this matter if people can understand you? A 2025 study in PNAS by Walter-Terrill and colleagues at Yale played listeners the same recording either clear or distorted. The words were equally easy to follow, yet hireability ratings fell from 76 to 68.5 out of 100. Being understood and sounding good are two different results, and free noise suppression mostly delivers the first.

When paying once makes more sense

If your problem is a fan, a keyboard or the odd siren, and you live in one or two apps, use the free filter inside those apps and stop there. For a lot of people that's the right answer, and no purchase improves on it enough to matter.

The math changes when the complaint is "I sound bad" rather than "it's noisy", or when one day takes you through Zoom, Meet, Slack, Telegram and OBS. That's the case TunedMic was built for. It adds a virtual microphone called TunedMic to the Mac. You read a short passage aloud for about a minute (Sound Check), it takes more than 30 measurements of your voice, mic and room, and builds nine profiles from them. Choose TunedMic as the mic in any app, and every app hears the same processed voice: noise, room echo, clarity, loudness and a 12-band equalizer handled together and tuned to you instead of a stock preset. It adds less than a tenth of a second of delay and runs locally, so your voice is never uploaded.

The limits, plainly. TunedMic needs a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or newer) and macOS 14 or later. There's no Windows version and no Intel support. It is free only for the first 3 days, and there are no refunds after you pay. It won't remove all noise, and it won't turn a budget mic into some specific expensive one. That's why the home page carries real, loudness-matched before/after recordings from a MacBook's built-in mic, a cheap wired headset and a Hollyland Lark M2, including one Lark take with a Dyson hair dryer running about a meter (3 ft) away, so you can judge your own case before paying.

On price: $39 once (launch price, regular $49), with a license for two Macs and a year of updates, and the license never expires. That's less than half of one year of Krisp Core on annual billing.

What to do now

Open the app you use most, set its noise filter to the middle level, and switch off any second filter stacked on top of it. Record ten seconds through that app with the fridge or fan running and play it back on headphones. If the noise is gone and you like how you sound, you're done and you haven't spent a cent.

If the noise is gone and you still don't like your voice, play the before/after recordings on the TunedMic home page from the mic closest to yours, then check pricing if they sound like what you want your calls to hear.