How to Remove Unnecessary Audio with Audacity

Trim out background noise, vocals, and other unnecessary audio with Audacity for Windows and macOS

Written by Jack Lloyd

Last Updated: October 25, 2022 Tested

Cutting Sections

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Removing Background Noise

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Removing Vocals

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Q&A

This wikiHow teaches you how to remove audio from a track in Audacity. There are a few different types of audio that you might want to remove, including sections of tracks, background noise, and lyrics. Keep in mind that Audacity's lyric removal tool is rudimentary and cannot remove all vocals.

Things You Should Know

If you want to remove an entire noisy section from a track, highlight the section with your mouse and press the Delete key.
Use the Noise Reduction effect to quickly suppress background noise in any track.
To remove vocals from a music track, use the Vocal Remover effect.

Method 1

Method 1 of 3:

Cutting Sections

1
Open Audacity. It's an image of an orange sound wave in the middle of a blue set of headphones.
2
Click File. You'll find it in either the top-left side of the Audacity window (Windows) or the top-left side of the screen (Mac).

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3
Click Open…. This is in the File drop-down menu. A new window will open.
4
Select an audio track. Click on a track that you want to edit.
5
Click Open. It's in the bottom-right corner of the window. The track will open in Audacity.
6
Select a section. Find a section that you want to remove, then click and drag your mouse across it to highlight it.
7
Press Delete. This will immediately remove the section from Audacity.
- You can also click Edit and then click Delete in the drop-down menu.

Method 2

Method 2 of 3:

Removing Background Noise

1
Select a background noise section of the track. Click and drag your mouse across a section of the track that contains only background noise if possible.
- If there isn't enough free track to do this, just select the section where the background noise is the most noticeable.
2
Click Effect. This tab is at the top of the Audacity window (Windows) or at the top of the screen (Mac). Doing so prompts a drop-down menu.
3
Click Noise Reduction…. It's near the middle of the Effect drop-down menu.
4
Click Get Noise Profile. This button is at the top of the window. This will help Audacity determine what is background noise and what isn't.
5
Select the section of track that you want to clean up. You can also click the track and then press either Ctrl+A (Windows) or ⌘ Command+A (Mac) to select the whole track, which is ideal if you're working with a song.
6
Click Effect, then click Repeat Noise Reduction. It's at the top of the drop-down menu. This will apply the suggested noise reduction to the track.
7
Reduce the noise again if necessary. If there's still a noticeable amount of background noise, repeat the noise removal process. You may have to do this several times.
- You can raise the amount of background noise removed by clicking Noise Reduction... in the drop-down menu and then sliding the "Noise reduction" slider to the right.

Method 3

Method 3 of 3:

Removing Vocals

1
Select the whole track. Click the audio track, then press either Ctrl+A (Windows) or ⌘ Command+A (Mac).
2
Click Effect. It's a tab at the top of the window (Windows) or screen (Mac).
3
Scroll all the way down and select Vocal Remover…. You may have to click a downward-facing arrow at the bottom of the drop-down menu to find this option. Selecting it prompts a pop-out menu.
4
Click a vocal remover plugin. In the pop-out menu to the right of the drop-down menu, click a link. This will open the vocal remover window.
5
Click OK. Doing so will remove some of the vocals from the track. While this isn't 100 percent reliable, you'll notice a significant difference in the result.
- You can perform this step multiple times to increase the percentage of vocals removed, though doing so may harm the recording's fidelity.

Community Q&A

Question

How do I remove a section without moving the rest of the track? I'm trying to cut out an intro but I want everything after it to remain in the same place.

Community Answer

Instead of trying to delete the section, I would use the "Generate... Silence" feature and overwrite that part of the song with silence. That will prevent the shifting.
Question

How do I delete laughter off of a song?

Community Answer

Laughter would be tricky. Your best bet is probably to use "Effect... Noise Reduction." You can then choose the best example of the sample noise possible (the laughter, with as little music in it as possible) and Audacity will do its best to filter the sound out.
Question

How much time should I add between songs that I copied from a cassette tape to split them?

Community Answer

You only need to add a few seconds, but if you want to be specific you could look up the songs and match up to the official song duration.