Remove background noise and polish your voice for calls, streams, and recordings. Everything is processed on your Windows PC.
AudioForge sits between your microphone and the apps you talk in. It cuts background noise, evens out your level, tames harsh "s" sounds and sudden peaks, and lets you shape your tone. A guided setup tests its suggestions on your own recording before you apply them. No account and no cloud service: your audio never leaves your PC.
Download for Windows · Set up in five steps · What it does · No sound?
Important
To use AudioForge in Discord, OBS, Zoom, or Teams, you also need a virtual audio cable. AudioForge doesn't install one. It is tested with the free VB-CABLE; other virtual cables should work but haven't been tested. You don't need a cable to monitor yourself on headphones.
| Your goal | What AudioForge gives you |
|---|---|
| Remove background noise | RNNoise or DeepFilterNet noise suppression, a speech-aware noise gate, and hum cleanup. |
| Sound consistent | A compressor with speech-aware automatic makeup gain, plus peak protection that stops clipping. |
| Shape your voice | A ten-band EQ you can drag or type into, Auto-EQ, and guided Auto Voice Setup. |
| Tame harshness | A de-esser that turns down sharp "s" and "sh" sounds only when they occur. |
| Stay in control | Presets, undo and redo, a global mute shortcut, level meters, and health indicators. |
Screenshots use example devices and settings.
Current version: v1.14.0 (release notes).
Open the latest release
and download one of these files. Not sure? Choose the installer.
- Installer (recommended):
AudioForge-v<version>-win64.msi, where<version>is the release number. Run it, then open AudioForge from the Start menu. It installs for your Windows user only. - Portable folder:
AudioForge-v<version>-win64-ultra.7z. Extract the whole archive, then runAudioForge.exe. If Windows can't open.7zfiles, use 7-Zip. "Ultra" is the compression level, not a different edition.
Both are about 100 MB and include everything the app needs; you don't need Python or Rust. The other files on the release page (source code, validation evidence, and checksums) are for verification and redistribution.
Windows SmartScreen: AudioForge isn't code-signed, so Windows may show
"Windows protected your PC". Download only from this repository's Releases
page. To confirm the file is intact, run Get-FileHash <file> in PowerShell
and compare the result with the matching line in
AudioForge-v<version>-SHA256SUMS.txt. Then choose More info > Run anyway.
- Install a virtual cable (once). Install VB-CABLE and restart if its installer asks you to. Skip this step if you only want to listen on headphones.
- Choose devices in AudioForge. Set Input to your microphone and Output to CABLE Input (VB-Audio Virtual Cable). To hear yourself first, choose your headphones as Output instead.
- Point your app at the cable. In Discord, OBS, Zoom, or Teams, set the microphone (input device) to CABLE Output (VB-Audio Virtual Cable).
- Start and check. Press Start Processing and speak. The AudioForge meters and your app's input meter should both move, and a short test recording in your app should contain your processed voice.
- Tune and save. Noise suppression starts with RNNoise, the low-latency default. Run Auto Voice Setup for a guided starting point, or adjust the EQ and dynamics yourself. Press Ctrl+S to save a preset when it sounds right.
AudioForge opens with processing stopped. Stop Processing keeps the window open. Closing the window stops audio and quits, unless you turn on close-to-tray in Options > Tray & Background. Then audio keeps running and you quit from File > Exit or Quit AudioForge in the tray. AudioForge doesn't start with Windows.
- Check that processing is started and Mute Output is off.
- Check the pair: AudioForge's Output is CABLE Input, and your app's microphone is CABLE Output. The two names are easy to swap.
- In Windows Settings, microphone privacy must allow desktop apps to use your microphone.
- Watch the meters to see where the signal stops. If AudioForge's input meter stays still, check the microphone. If AudioForge's output moves but your app's meter doesn't, check the cable selection in your app.
- Still stuck? Open an issue and attach Help > Export Diagnostics.... The export excludes audio and real device names; check it before you share it.
- Processing mode: Normal runs the full chain. Bypass skips voice effects but keeps input cleanup and output protection. Raw also skips input cleanup, for troubleshooting.
- Compare Recording: after calibration, hear the same passage as original, current, and proposed processing before you apply anything.
- Shortcuts: Ctrl+S saves your preset, Ctrl+Shift+S saves a copy, and Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z undo and redo. Ctrl+Alt+M mutes from anywhere once you enable it in Options > Tray & Background.
- Unsaved changes: quitting or switching presets offers Save, Discard, or Cancel.
How Auto-EQ and Auto Voice Setup make their suggestions
- Two EQ stages. Calibration writes a correction stage. Your own edits go in a separate tone stage, so changing gains, templates, filter types, or slopes keeps the calibration. Older presets keep their combined EQ as the tone stage.
- Your voice stays yours. Speech alone can't reveal a microphone's exact frequency response, so automatic targets keep the recorded voice and apply bounded tonal preferences. Natural / No Added Tone stays neutral. Warm / Full Voice adds low-mid body with restrained upper presence; Adaptive keeps it subtle and Static uses the stronger catalog curve.
- Suggestions have to earn a change. Auto Voice Setup tries gate and noise suppression options with the proposed dynamics on part of your recording. It keeps your current settings unless a candidate passes safety and speech-preservation checks and improves a separate part of the recording. DeepFilterNet settings stay within DeepFilterNet, because automatic switches back to RNNoise failed clean-speech checks. CPU timing is only a pass/fail limit; it never ranks sound quality.
- Compression and loudness. EQ is fitted first. Compression calibration then tunes the compressor with your requested automatic makeup gain. If your target loudness can't leave safe headroom, the result stays advisory: choose a lower (more negative) LUFS target and run it again.
- Verified before it sticks. A suggestion stays temporary until a second passage checks it through the full chain. Adjustments reuse a valid take, and your previous sound comes back if verification can't succeed. Recorded checks can't reproduce live device dropouts, so confirm the result in your destination app.
Full feature reference
Sound processing:
- Noise suppression with RNNoise or DeepFilterNet (both included).
- Noise gate with Threshold Only, VAD Assisted, and VAD Only modes, smooth speech-confidence gain control, and an automatic threshold that tracks the room's noise floor in the VAD modes.
- Ten-band EQ with bell, notch, shelf, and pass filters, 12–48 dB/octave pass slopes, click-free bypass, and drag or keyboard editing on the graph.
- Auto-EQ that uses speech detection, rejects unreliable parts of a capture, and declines to correct when a safe correction isn't supported.
- Dynamic-EQ de-esser, compressor with speech-aware automatic makeup gain, and lookahead limiter.
- True-peak protection that uses 320 samples of lookahead (6.67 ms at 48 kHz) when enabled, in addition to other processing and device delays.
- Mono alignment for stereo microphones and adaptive 50/60 Hz hum removal.
- Latency calibration for each input/output pair. It measures your route and improves the reported estimate; it can't reduce physical delay.
- Undo and redo for manual edits, presets, Auto-EQ, and Auto Voice Setup.
Reliability and diagnostics:
- Input/output meters, health indicators, and technical counters behind Details.
- Automatic stream restart after device errors.
- Device refresh keeps your selection when the device is still available. Streams prefer 48 kHz when the device supports it.
- Help > Export Diagnostics... writes a size-limited support file. It includes configuration and health fields, replaces device names with report-specific codes, and excludes audio, environment variables, secrets, and arbitrary paths.
AudioForge is built for Windows 10 (version 1809 or later) and Windows 11, 64-bit. Linux and macOS aren't supported.
Hardware testing so far covers Windows 11 at 48 kHz with USB microphones and VB-CABLE, including 30-minute runs and model switching, on earlier release candidates. The final release binaries haven't repeated that full hardware run. Windows 10, analog inputs, 44.1 kHz, device unplug and replug, and sleep recovery aren't hardware-tested yet. Each release's evidence archive records its automated validation; see the release workflow. Measured sound-processing decisions are indexed in evaluation/README.md.
Audio passes through these stages in order:
- Input cleanup: DC removal and one high-pass filter
- Noise gate
- Noise suppression
- De-esser
- Ten-band EQ
- Compressor
- Limiter and true-peak protection
Bypass skips voice effects but keeps input cleanup and output protection. Raw also skips input cleanup and takes precedence over Bypass. The latency shown in the app includes engine and noise-suppression delay, plus your measured route when you calibrate it. End-to-end latency still depends on your devices, driver, buffer sizes, and routing.
- Report a bug or request a feature: open an issue with your app version, what you expected, and steps to reproduce.
- Report a security issue: follow SECURITY.md.
- Contribute: follow CONTRIBUTING.md.
These steps are for building AudioForge, not for running the download. The
engine is written in Rust and the interface in PyQt6. You need Windows 10
(1809+) or 11 x64, CPython 3.13.15 x64, the Rust toolchain selected by
rust-toolchain.toml, GitHub CLI (gh), and 7-Zip.
git clone https://github.com/FueledByRedBull/audio-forge.git
cd audio-forge
py -3.13 -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install --require-hashes -r requirements/dev.txt
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe python/tools/fetch_release_assets.py
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install --no-deps --no-build-isolation -e .
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m maturin develop --release --locked
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m mic_eqThe fallback release is pinned once in release-assets.json; it supplies
runtime assets independently of the application version. Hydration verifies
each asset against the manifest.
RNNoise is the default suppression backend. For source runs, enable
DeepFilterNet with AUDIOFORGE_ENABLE_DEEPFILTER=1 after hydrating the runtime
assets. Packaged builds enable verified bundled DeepFilter assets
automatically. External DLL/model paths require an explicit opt-in; see
runtime configuration.
- CONTRIBUTING.md: development checks, runtime configuration, and screenshot generation.
- RELEASING.md: portable/MSI builds, package validation, release archives, and publication.
- evaluation/README.md: objective DSP evidence and retention.
Planned work and explicit holds live in versioned
GitHub milestones
and issues labeled
roadmap.
AudioForge's original source is MIT-licensed; see LICENSE. The portable and MSI downloads include PyQt6 and are distributed under GPLv3, with the notices in licenses/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and the corresponding source described in licenses/SOURCE_DISTRIBUTION.md.
- RNNoise by Jean-Marc Valin
- DeepFilterNet by Hendrik Schroter and contributors
- Silero VAD contributors