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Noise is easier to prevent than to fix. Software cleanup can do a lot, but it's still cleanup — the recording itself is where most of this problem actually gets solved. So how exactly do you reduce background noise when recording a new podcast episode?

Before you record

Pick the quietest room, not the nicest-looking one. A closet full of clothes will out-perform a home office with hard floors and bare walls, every time. Soft surfaces absorb sound; hard surfaces bounce it around as echo, which reads as “noisy” even when there's no literal noise source.

Turn off what you can control. HVAC/AC units, fans, refrigerators in an adjacent room, notifications on every device in the room. None of these feel loud while you're talking — they all show up clearly once you're listening back in headphones during editing.

Close the gap between your mouth and the mic. The farther the mic is from your mouth, the more room noise it picks up relative to your voice. 6–12 inches is the usual sweet spot — closer than that risks plosives (hard “p” and “b” sounds popping the mic).

Use a cardioid dynamic mic if you're in an untreated room. Cardioid mics pick up sound mainly from the front and reject sound from the sides and rear — which matters more in a normal room than any other spec. We cover this in best podcast microphones and USB vs XLR microphones if you're still deciding on gear.

During recording

  • Do a 30-second test recording and actually listen back before recording the real thing — headphones on, not through your laptop speakers.
  • Watch for recurring sources mid-recording: a laptop fan kicking in, someone walking past a window, a dog getting excited two rooms over. If you notice it while recording, you can pause and wait it out instead of hoping editing will fix it later.
  • If recording remotely, don't rely on a video call app as your source audio. Tools built for podcast recording — Riverside.fm for example — record each person's track locally on their own device, so background noise on one end doesn't compress and degrade everyone else's audio the way it can over a live call connection.

What software can fix afterward

Once you're in editing, noise reduction and leveling tools can clean up a lot — but they work best on noise that's already fairly minor, not as a rescue for a genuinely loud environment.

Auphonic is a strong first pass: automated noise reduction and level normalization that handles the baseline cleanup before you do anything manual. Descript also has a Studio Sound feature that helps clean up rougher recordings, on top of its transcript-based editing.

Neither tool works miracles on a recording made next to a running dishwasher. They're for tightening up a decent recording, not saving a bad one. See the full equipment checklist for everything else worth having before you hit record.

The honest tradeoff

Every step above costs you something — a quieter room might be a less comfortable one, a closer mic means more discipline about plosives, remote recording software means asking guests to install something extra. None of it is complicated, but it does add friction to just hitting record. That's usually fine for the first several episodes. Once noise cleanup and everything else in the edit is eating real time every week, that's the point most hosts start looking at outsourcing the edit entirely rather than fixing it manually each time.

If that's where you're headed, see how our editing process works.