Free iZotope RX Alternatives for Audio Repair (2026)
Free alternatives to iZotope RX for noise removal and audio repair. What free tools handle well, what they can't touch, and when RX is worth the money.
iZotope RX is the most expensive thing most producers ever consider buying. The full version runs past £1,000, and even the entry tier isn't cheap.
It's also close to magic. Hum, hiss, a chair creak, a click, a siren in the background — RX removes things that sound impossible to remove.
Free alternatives are thinner here than in any other category, so this is a realistic look rather than a list of pretenders.
What You're Actually Trying to Fix
Worth splitting, because the free options handle these very differently.
Broadband noise — hiss, air conditioning, room tone. Free tools cope reasonably well.
Hum — mains buzz at 50Hz and its harmonics. Free tools cope well.
Clicks, pops and mouth noise — free tools cope badly.
One-off events — a door, a cough, a phone. This is where RX is untouchable, because you can paint the noise out of a spectrogram and leave the rest intact.
Audacity
Free, open source, and its noise reduction is better than its reputation suggests.
You select a section of pure noise, let it learn the profile, then apply it to the whole file.
Good for: steady hiss and room tone on spoken word or a vocal take
Falls short: push it and you get that underwater, swirling artefact. It has no idea what's noise and what's music
Bertom Denoiser
A free plugin that runs in your DAW rather than offline, which makes it far more practical than bouncing files in and out of Audacity.
Good for: real-time noise reduction while you work
Falls short: broadband noise only. It won't touch a one-off click
ReaFIR
Part of Reaper's free plugin set, and usable in other DAWs. It has a subtract mode that learns a noise profile and removes it.
Good for: hum and consistent background noise, free, inside your session
Falls short: unfriendly interface, and it takes some setting up
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Your DAW's Own Tools
Often overlooked. A steep high-pass filter kills rumble. A narrow notch EQ at 50Hz and its multiples handles most mains hum. A gate closes the gaps between phrases so noise only exists under the vocal.
That combination solves a surprising share of real problems for nothing.
What Free Tools Genuinely Can't Do
Spectral repair. RX shows you sound as a picture and lets you erase part of it. A cough during a sung word can be removed with the word intact. Nothing free does this properly, and it's the reason RX exists.
De-clicking and mouth noise at a usable standard.
Quality under pressure. Free noise reduction is fine at gentle settings and falls apart when pushed. RX stays convincing much further.
If you're restoring old recordings or working with dialogue, that gap is the whole job. Our vinyl recording guide touches on the same problem.
Real-World Use in Lessons
Most repair problems we see at Future Sound Academy were created at the recording stage, and the honest fix is to record it again.
A noisy vocal usually means the gain was too low, the room was untreated, or the mic was the wrong choice — the sort of thing our post on microphones for vocals gets into. Ten minutes spent fixing that beats an hour of repair every time, and it's free.
For electronic producers specifically, RX is rarely the missing piece. Almost nobody making club music from samples and synths needs it.
Final Takeaway
Start with a high-pass, a notch EQ and a gate. Add Bertom Denoiser for hiss. That handles most of what a producer runs into.
Buy RX if you work with recorded audio commercially — dialogue, podcasts, restoration — where one save justifies the price. If you're making electronic music, spend the money on your room or your mic instead, and a session will tell you which.
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