Auphonic vs. Audio Audit (comparison)

Auphonic and Audio Audit aren’t direct competitors but they do have some comparable features that are super important for podcasters and audio producers.

Auphonic’s strengths lie in its ability to automatically enhance audio files without intervention, which places it firmly in the realm of audio production software. Audio Audit started life as the other half of that job — checking your audio is up to standard, identifying mistakes and suggesting ways to increase your podcast’s reach — and as of August 2026 it does both. With Enhancements, Audio Audit now fixes what it finds: analyse the episode, apply the fixes it suggests, then re-run the report to prove the numbers actually moved. Analyse, fix, verify, in one place. It also keeps watching afterwards, with long-term monitoring and scoring across multiple shows, which is good for studios and collaborators.

This page was last fact-checked against auphonic.com in August 2026.

Comparison Overview

File and Metadata Checks

Analysis and Detection

Enhancement and Editing

Monitoring and Reporting

Plans and Pricing

Noise Reduction

Auphonic’s “Noise and Reverb Reduction” helps you fix audio that wasn’t recorded in an ideal studio with a high quality microphone. It’s genuinely good at it, and it’s broader than ours: you can choose between static and dynamic denoising, speech isolation or the classic algorithm, and it will take reverb out of a boxy room as well as noise. We don’t do reverb removal at all.

Audio Audit approaches noise from two directions, and it’s worth being clear about which does what. First, detection: it measures the background noise floor so you can see when a signal is simply too dirty to save, and an AI classifier that recognises dozens of different types of unwanted noise marks the one-off events — coughs, sneezes and children, through to engines, car alarms, sirens and phone notifications. Detection tells you what is wrong and where, right down to the timestamp, and it leaves the decision to you. Sometimes it’s good to leave certain noises in to give ambience and form a soundscape.

Second, and this is what’s new: enhancement now removes the constant background for you. Noise reduction builds a noise profile from the quietest moments of your recording — your room’s particular hum, hiss and air conditioning, rather than a generic guess — and subtracts it frequency by frequency, with a soft gate that lowers the level between phrases instead of hard-muting them so pauses still sound like a room rather than a void. It’s deliberately capped at 12 dB, safely below the point where spectral processing on speech starts to sound underwater. If your recording is noisier than that, the honest fix is at the source, and we’d rather tell you than quietly make your audio worse.

So the split is: the report marks the cough at 14:32 for you to decide about, and the enhancement takes out the hiss underneath the whole episode.

Audio Levelling

The standard loudness for podcasts is -16 LUFS. Auphonic lets you define a target loudness, a true peak limit, a MaxLRA and more, which is a properly flexible set of controls, and its Adaptive Leveler balances the gap between a loud guest and a quiet host before the target is applied. Its preset list is longer than ours, too: alongside EBU R128 and ATSC A/85 it ships named targets for Apple Music, YouTube, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Alexa, Netflix and Audible/ACX — a superset of what we offer, the -16 LUFS podcast standard and YouTube’s -14 LUFS included.

Audio Audit now hits that target too. Volume normalisation ships with presets for podcast platforms (-16 LUFS), YouTube (-14 LUFS) and ACX audiobooks (-19 LUFS), all with true-peak-safe limiting, and a custom option if your target is something else. It’s a two-pass measurement built on the same ITU-R BS.1770 loudness model broadcast uses: measure the whole episode, then apply a single constant gain change. Because the gain is constant, normalisation changes how loud your episode is and never how it breathes. Compression is available alongside it for the loud-guest problem, with the threshold set from your own measured speech level rather than a fixed number.

Setting a target doesn’t mean your levelling software hit it — the standards allow ±1 dB of wiggle room precisely because tools have to compress or limit to get there. To be fair to Auphonic, it is not shy about its own numbers here: its results page reports Programme Loudness, Maximum True Peak and Loudness Range for the input and the output file, and you can add an Audio Processing Statistics file to any production as a text, JSON or YAML download. If you want evidence that it hit your target, it hands you evidence.

The difference is who does the measuring, and when. Auphonic’s statistics come from the processor that did the work — accurate, but it’s marking its own homework. Audio Audit’s verification comes from the other direction: run a fresh report on the enhanced file and it’s a full audit over the finished artefact rather than a by-product of the processing job, so the loudness figure lands in the same report as the true peak, the noise floor, the metadata and the cover art rather than on its own.

And it carries on after you publish. Point Audio Audit at your RSS feed and it re-checks the file your host actually served, which isn’t always the file you uploaded — hosts re-encode, and a re-encode can shift your loudness and clip your peaks long after every tool in your production chain has finished and gone home. Fix, verify, then verify again on the version your listeners are downloading.

Mastering, EQ and Auto-Enhancement

Auphonic’s Filtering and Enhancement section is a set of separate tools rather than one button. Voice AutoEQ automatically analyses and optimises the frequency spectrum of a voice recording and deals with plosives; a De-Esser removes sibilance; and alongside them sit adaptive high-pass filtering, Bandwidth Extension for restoring missing high frequencies, and Studio Voice, which reconstructs studio-quality audio from a poor recording. On top of that, its cutting algorithms will automatically remove silent segments, filler words like “um”, “uh” and “mh”, and coughs and throat-clearings.

Audio Audit does none of that, and we’d rather say so plainly than bluff. There’s no EQ, no de-esser, no filler-word removal, no silence cutting, and no plans to fake any of them. If AI mastering and voice reconstruction is what you’re after, Auphonic wins this section outright — though it isn’t perfect, and artefacts have been known to appear the harder you push tools like this.

What Audio Audit’s enhancement is instead is deliberately narrow and deliberately measured. Four things — noise reduction, speech levelling, loudness normalisation and metadata writing — in any combination, running as a single job on a single file: decoded once, processed once at full resolution, encoded once, so there’s no compounding quality loss between steps. Every stage measures your recording before it decides what to do, in a fixed and conventional order. And there is no generative AI anywhere in it. Nothing is synthesised, nobody’s voice is reconstructed, and the same input gives you the same output every time. When it finishes, the results page shows you exactly what was measured and what was done.

That’s a real trade-off, not a hedge. Auphonic will make a rough recording sound better than we will. Audio Audit will tell you precisely what it changed, and prove it.

Paying For It

This is the part where the two products have quietly converged, so let’s be straight about it: both of us sell one-off credits, and neither of us makes you take out a subscription to fix a single episode.

Auphonic is free for up to 2 hours of processed audio a month, with a jingle added to free productions. Beyond that, its smallest recurring plan is $13 a month for 9 hours, or $11 a month if you pay yearly, which works out around $132 a year; one-time credit packs start at $12 for 5 hours and never expire (all as of August 2026 — check auphonic.com for current figures).

Audio Audit runs on credits, with free credits every month, monthly plans if your usage is steady, and one-off top-up packs valid for 12 months if it isn’t. Reports and enhancements draw on the same balance — a full clean-up costs about the same per minute as a full standard analysis — and you see the estimate before you commit. Current prices are on the pricing page rather than in this article, because comparison pages go stale and pricing pages don’t.

Auphonic’s credits outlast ours — theirs never expire, ours are good for a year — so if your podcasting is genuinely occasional, that’s a point in their favour. The difference worth weighing isn’t the pack, it’s what the credits buy: with Audio Audit, one balance covers the analysis, the fix and the ongoing feed monitoring, so the tool that found the problem is the tool that fixes it and the tool that confirms it’s gone.

So Which One?

If you want a finished episode to sound as polished as an automated tool can make it — AutoEQ, de-essing, reverb removal, silence and filler cutting, voice reconstruction — use Auphonic. It’s very good at that, and it has been for years.

If you want to know whether your episode is actually up to standard, fix the specific things that aren’t, confirm the numbers moved, and then keep an eye on every episode you publish from here on, that’s Audio Audit. And plenty of people will sensibly use both.

Want the full detail on what Audio Audit’s enhancements do? See the Enhancements announcement and the Enhancing Audio guide, or head to the Pricing page to see what a report or an enhancement costs for your episode length. Comparing other tools too? We’ve written the same honest breakdown for Descript, Adobe Podcast Enhance and Cleanvoice.

Photo courtesy of Julia Caesar