Remove reverb from audio
Diffio reduces reverb, the roomy, far-away sound of speech recorded in a hard or large room, in audio and video you've already recorded.
The talk was in a hall, the mic was on the lectern and every word trails into the next. Upload the file you have and hear the voice with less of the room around it.
Remove reverb from a recording
Drag an audio or video file here, orPick an audio or video file from your phone
MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, FLAC or OGG audio, or MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV or WebM video. Up to 90 minutes and 2 GB per file.
Free plan: 3 uploads, audio or video, with a 2-minute preview of each result. Downloads and the Pro model from $8 per month.
Three roomy recordings, before and after
Two lecture rooms measured by a university lab and one real lecture recorded from the hall. Press play, then switch versions. Your place in the clip stays the same.
Listen for: How long each word keeps ringing after the speaker stops. In the original the room is still sounding when the next word starts.
Sample made by playing clean speech (LibriTTS, CC BY 4.0) through a real measured impulse response of a large lecture room (room D105, BUT Speech@FIT Reverb Database, Brno University of Technology, CC BY 4.0). Restored with Diffio 4.6 Pro. Both clips are loudness-matched for playback.
- Speech: LibriTTS test-clean, speaker 2830, LibriTTS (Zen et al., 2019), from a public domain LibriVox reading, CC BY 4.0.
- Room impulse response: BUT Speech@FIT Reverb Database, room D105 (lecture room, about 2,000 m³), Brno University of Technology, Speech@FIT (Szöke et al., 2019), CC BY 4.0.
Each pair is the clip we uploaded and the restored speech Diffio returned on November 3, 2026, with one fixed volume change so both play at the same loudness. Full credits and the sample record are published with the files.
Reverb or echo: which one do you have?
Both come from sound bouncing off the room, but they sound different.
- Reverb is thousands of reflections arriving so close together that you can't pick one out. You hear it as a wash or tail after each word, and as a voice that sounds hollow, distant or like it's in a bathroom. That's this page.
- Echo is a repeat you can hear on its own: a shout coming back off the far wall of a gym, or your own voice returning on a call a moment later. For distinct repeats, see removing echo from audio, where you can hear 5 echoey rooms restored.
Most recordings people describe as echoey are mostly reverb. Engineers call removing it de-reverb or dereverberation, and the plugins that do it are called reverb removers.
What makes a recording sound roomy
Three things decide how much room ends up in a recording.
The room
Hard, flat surfaces such as bare walls, glass, tile, stone and wooden floors reflect sound instead of absorbing it, and big rooms keep it bouncing longer. Engineers measure this as reverb time, how long a sound takes to fade by 60 dB. The two lecture rooms in the player above measure about 1.1 and 1.3 seconds, so a word is still sounding well after the speaker has moved on.
The distance from mouth to mic
This matters most. The voice reaches the mic once, directly, and the room reaches it from every direction. Every time the distance doubles, the direct voice gets quieter while the room stays about the same, so a mic across the room hears mostly room. That's why a camera mic at the back sounds so much worse than a lavalier on the speaker.
The mic
Phone, laptop and camera mics pick up sound from every direction, so they collect more of the room than a directional mic aimed at the speaker.
How to prevent reverb while recording
- Get the mic close. A lavalier, a headset mic or a handheld mic a few inches from the mouth does more than any treatment of the room.
- Pick the softest room available. Carpet, curtains, sofas and full bookshelves absorb reflections. A small furnished room beats a large empty one.
- Stay away from walls and corners, and point the mic away from glass and bare walls.
- Add soft things in a pinch. Blankets over hard surfaces, or recording a voiceover in a closet full of clothes, cuts the tail a lot.
- For talks and services, take a feed from the sound desk instead of recording the room from the back.
How to remove reverb from audio with Diffio
- Upload the original. MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, FLAC or OGG audio, or MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV or WebM video, up to 90 minutes and 2 GB on every plan.
- Choose a model. Both models reduce reverb. Diffio 4.6 Flash is fast and on every plan, including Free. Diffio 4.6 Pro is the higher-quality model and restores every window 3 times, keeping the cleanest. The Pro model is included in Basic.
- Compare. Switch between the original and the restored speech on the same playhead. Listen to the ends of words and the pauses, where the tail was.
- Download the restored speech or the full video on a paid plan. If the voice sounds too dry for the scene, a slider mixes some of the background back in.
Background noise comes out in the same pass, so a hall with air conditioning running gets both fixed at once. For lectures, classes and conference talks, the lecture audio guide covers the rest of the job.
What Diffio can't fix
- A voice the room has swallowed. When the mic was so far away that the room is louder than the speaker, the result improves less. Try your own file and compare.
- Overlapping speakers. Two people talking at once stay together in one speech track, because Diffio doesn't separate speakers.
- Singing and instruments. Diffio restores speech. Music goes to the background track, so reverb on a vocal needs a music tool.
- Severe clipping on top of heavy reverb limits the result.
How to reduce reverb in Audacity, Premiere Pro and Audition
Reverb is harder to remove by hand than hum or hiss, because the room sound sits on the words themselves rather than only in the gaps.
Audacity (free)
- Audacity's built-in effects don't include a de-reverb.
- The Noise Gate effect can turn down the tail in the pauses between phrases. Set the threshold just above the tail and keep the attack and release gentle so words don't get chopped.
- A gate does nothing to the reverb on the words themselves, so expect a modest improvement.
Adobe Premiere Pro
- Select the clip and tag it as Dialogue in the Essential Sound panel.
- Open Repair and turn on Reduce Reverb.
- Raise it a little at a time. Pushed too far, the voice starts to sound processed and phasey.
Adobe Audition and iZotope RX
- In Audition, select the audio and open Effects, Noise Reduction / Restoration, DeReverb. Set the amount while you preview.
- iZotope RX includes De-reverb in RX Elements, Standard and Advanced, and runs as a module in the RX editor or as a plugin in your editor.
For more on choosing between these tools, see Diffio and iZotope RX compared. If reverb is only one of several problems, making audio sound better walks through the rest.
Questions about reverb
What is the difference between reverb and echo?
Echo is a repeat you can pick out, like a shout coming back off a far wall. Reverb is thousands of reflections blurred together into the wash that makes a voice sound roomy and far away. Diffio reduces both in recorded speech. Removing distinct echoes from audio.
Is there a free way to remove reverb from audio?
The Free plan restores 3 uploads and lets you hear the first 2 minutes of each result. Audacity is free, but its built-in effects don't include a de-reverb, so free options beyond that are limited.
Is there a way to reverse reverb?
Not by subtracting it. The reflections arrive mixed in with the voice, so a de-reverb tool has to tell the speaker from the room and turn the room down. That works best when the voice is still clearly louder than the room.
What plugin can remove reverb?
iZotope RX De-reverb, included in RX Elements, Standard and Advanced, is the common choice in an editor. Adobe Audition has a DeReverb effect, and Premiere Pro has Reduce Reverb in the Essential Sound panel. Diffio is not a plugin: you upload the file in a browser or send it through the API.
Will all of the reverb come out?
Results depend on the recording. A voice a few feet from the mic comes back much drier than one recorded from the back of a large hall, where the room is louder than the speaker. Try your own file and compare.
Can I remove reverb from vocals or music?
Diffio restores speech. Singing and instruments are separated into the background track rather than restored, so for reverb on a vocal, a music tool or a plugin in your audio editor is the better fit.
Can I remove reverb from a video?
Yes. Upload MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV or WebM on any plan, including Free. Diffio restores the speech in the soundtrack and leaves the picture as it was.
Is it free to try?
Yes. The Free plan includes 3 uploads, audio or video, with a 2-minute preview of each result on Diffio 4.6 Flash. Full playback, downloads and the Pro model start with Basic at $8 per month. See plans and limits.
Less room, more voice
Upload a recording from the hardest room you have and hear the restored speech next to the original. Results depend on the recording, which is why the first 3 are free.