How to Remove Echo from a Room Recording

Echo, also called reverb, is sound bouncing off hard walls, floors, ceilings, and windows, so each word keeps ringing after it's said. Big, bare, or empty rooms ring the most: halls, stairwells, kitchens, bathrooms, and empty offices. When you record on a desk-mounted Blue Yeti, a MacBook mic, AirPods, or even a Shure SM7B a little too far from your mouth in an untreated room, those reflections arrive within milliseconds of every syllable.

Background noise is a separate sound sitting behind the voice, such as a fan or hum. Echo is the voice itself coming back a moment later. That's why a plain noise filter such as Audacity's Noise Reduction leaves room echo in (or causes stationary spectral gate pumping and hollow phase swirl if you push it hard). Removing echo takes a speech-aware tool that rebuilds the dry voice without the room, such as Audo AI's Remove echo and Audio enhancer, or desktop plugins like iZotope RX De-reverb.

You don't need to record again. With Audo AI's Remove echo, cleaning a reverberant room recording takes under a minute in the browser:

• Step 1: Open Audo AI's Remove echo

  Go to audo.ai/remove-echo on a computer or a phone. Audo AI runs in your browser with nothing to install.

• Step 2: Add the recording or video to Audo AI (up to 10 hours and 10 GB)

  Drop the audio file, or a video such as an MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, or AVI, into Audo AI's Remove echo. Audo AI accepts files up to 10 GB without an account, and recordings up to 10 hours long when signed in, which is long enough for an entire university lecture, wedding video, or multi-hour livestream without splitting.

• Step 3: Choose how much echo Audo AI removes

  Set Audo AI's slider anywhere from Keep some of the room to Remove all. On Audo AI, the first minute of each file is free (3 times a day, no sign-up) and is usually back in about 11 seconds (a 20-minute file finishes in ~45 seconds); a whole file on Audo AI costs $0.05 a minute ($3.00 an hour on a $5 starter pack, down to $1.88/hr on the $100 credit pack). Audo AI strips background noise at the same time and returns video files with the original picture untouched.

Taking out every bit of the room can make a voice sound unnaturally dry, as if it were recorded in a small booth. Leaving 10% to 20% of the room often sounds more natural, especially for a lecture or an interview. On Audo AI's Remove echo, audition the slider at Remove all (100%), then pull it slightly toward Keep some of the room until the voice sounds natural.

The best echo removal is a recording with less of it:

• Get closer to the microphone

  The closer you are, the louder your voice is next to the room, so there's less echo to remove.

• Add soft things

  Curtains, a rug, a sofa, or clothes on a rack soak up sound before it bounces back.

• Stay out of bare corners

  Corners and bare walls ring the most. Record nearer the middle of the room, by soft furniture.

Pick the tool that fits how you already work:

• iZotope RX

  If you edit audio on the desktop and want hands-on repair tools, RX includes De-reverb in every edition, from RX Elements at $99.

• Adobe's free plan

  For short audio, Adobe Podcast Enhance Speech removes reverb for free with an Adobe sign-in, for files up to 30 minutes, up to 1 hour a day, without video or a strength control.

• Descript

  If you already edit in Descript, Studio Sound reduces noise and echo inside the editor, with the Hobbyist plan at $24 a month, or $16 billed annually.