guide · mac microphone
How to remove background noise from your Mac microphone
Updated
Fans, traffic, a café, the dog. Start with the free fixes below; they cost nothing and often solve it. If they don’t, the last section covers an app that cleans your mic for every app at once.
1. Get the mic closer to your mouth
This is the biggest single fix, and it works with everything else on this page. The room’s noise stays the same while your voice gets louder, so a headset or a mic a hand’s width from your mouth beats a laptop mic an arm’s length away. Halving the distance makes your voice about 6 dB louder against the room.
Then check which mic is actually in use: System Settings → Sound → Input. A Mac that switched back to its built-in mic is a common cause of “why do I suddenly sound far away?”
2. Turn down the noise itself
Close the window, switch off the desk fan for the call, move away from the air conditioner, face away from the noise. Soft things in the room (curtains, a sofa, a rug) also cut echo, which noise removal cannot fully undo. Specific culprits have their own guides: fan noise and a barking dog.
3. Use Voice Isolation, if your app supports it
macOS has a free built-in filter called Voice Isolation, which you choose from the Mic Mode menu during a call in apps that support Mic Modes, such as FaceTime. It works well. Its limits: it only appears in those apps, and it is on or off, with no way to make it gentler or stronger. How to turn on Voice Isolation on a Mac, and why the option is sometimes missing.
4. Turn on your call app’s noise suppression
Zoom and Microsoft Teams each have their own setting: in Zoom it is under Settings → Audio, in Teams under Settings → Devices. Google Meet has one too, but only on some paid Google Workspace and Google One plans. These work well inside that app. They don’t help anywhere else: a recording app, OBS or the next call app still hears the raw mic. (Streaming? OBS has its own filter.)
5. When that isn’t enough: one clean mic for every app
If the noise is still there, or you need it gone in more than one app, a noise cancelling microphone fixes it once. Aurio installs a microphone called “Aurio Microphone” that removes background noise in real time, on your Mac. Pick it in Zoom, Meet, Teams, OBS or any app that lets you choose a mic, and they all get the cleaned sound. A strength slider sets how hard it works.
Hear what it does to real noise, then try it free for 14 days. It is $40 and yours to keep, with a year of updates that renews yearly (or $70 with lifetime updates), and needs no account. (How it compares with Krisp.)