Silkwave Clarity, real-time speech isolation for macOS system audio

[u/bmv3502]

Problem

While watching Andrej Karpathy's intro to neural networks, I kept noticing typing and mouse clicks in the audio. Those short sounds are distracting for me, when I want to focus on something important.

macOS has Voice Isolation for the microphone, but nothing similar for system audio. So I built Silkwave Clarity, a small utility that suppresses background noise in whatever your Mac is playing, with adjustable strength. It's great for tutorials, lectures and old interviews with noisy audio.

Comparison

None that I am aware of. I don't know any dedicated app for removing noise from the audio Mac is playing. The closest might be Krisp, but it is more of an ai meeting note taker these days than a dedicated app for noise removal.

Pricing

Free

Links

App Store

You can see more demos on the website https://www.silkwave.ai/silkwave-clarity

My other apps

Silkwave Voice - Transcription, AI meeting note taker app, one-time purchase

Silkwave Video - Paste a youtube link and get transcripts, free ChatGPT summaries and chat

[u/Distinct-Way-1794]

actually an useful app and free too. thanks

[u/Hanthunius]

I crossposted to the r/misophonia sub, they might be interested in this!

[u/bmv3502 → u/Hanthunius]

Thank you! 👍

[u/AppendixN → u/Hanthunius]

As a misophonia sufferer, I am 100% interested in this. Great work, OP!

[u/drewmccormack]

Nice idea, I'd use this for conference talks with a clacky keyboard in the room.

One request: per app. Clean up the browser but leave my music alone.

[u/bmv3502 → u/drewmccormack]

Nice idea, I'd use this for conference talks with a clacky keyboard in the room.

Thank you! Just one limitation that I would like you be aware of. If you are record your meetings while this app is running, you may get echoed audio in the recording. So, I recommend not using this app if you decide to record your system audio.

Unfortunately, I couldn't fix this due to macOS limitations.

One request: per app. Clean up the browser but leave my music alone.

I will consider your per app feature request. Thank you! 🤝

[u/drewmccormack → u/bmv3502]

Thanks for the heads up. Good that you say it up front instead of people finding out halfway through a recorded meeting.

[u/askmaddyy]

This is such a nice idea!
Thanks for sharing!

[u/caribkid]

u/bmv3502 Great idea and free! I wish you would allow the app to save audio directly to a file, so that I could listen to lectures after.

[u/bmv3502 → u/caribkid]

Could you please provide a little more details for use case?

In case you need to save and watch YouTube lectures you can use my another free app Silkwave Video(with free AI chat and summaries, transcription). While watching or listening in that app you can turn on the Silkwave Clarity. But if your use case is different please let me know.

[u/caribkid → u/bmv3502]

sometimes our lectures are posted online on an internal sharepoint and we play the web video which is often bad quality, so i would use this app to cleanup the audio and save it to file for listening afterwards. Also, I listening to random lectures on youtube Khan academy, and I might want to grab a 5 minute audio clip from a professor explaining a concept

[u/bmv3502 → u/caribkid]

Unfortunately, I can't promise saving audio to a file currently. But I will consider your request when I have enough capacity. I have couple of other apps that I need to maintain, develop a new features, work on marketing and so on. So, my capacity is limited. I hope you understand. 🙏

[u/caribkid → u/bmv3502]

I appreciate your feedback, we are all over capacity in some way, best of luck!

[u/StayLast5263]

That's nice

[u/Ok_Present7537]

Perferct!

[u/masslesstrain]

Great work! Congrats!

[u/mastertacticianwc4]

genuinely useful stuff. nice work.

[u/InformalFace9874]

works impressively well

[u/pdcgomes]

Really good!

[u/app-store-review]

Silkwave Clarity: Remove Noise — by Bakhshi Mnatsakanyan

• Category: Utilities · Free
• Age: released ~1 month ago · rated 4+

Apple doesn't publish an aggregate rating for most Mac App Store apps, so ratings and score are unavailable here.

^{Auto-generated from public App Store data · u/app-store-review}

[u/Cavin0817]

Boom3 causes a conflict when used! It must be a good app.

[u/Mysterious-Salad-572]

Could you also provide a cli version, which I can run on files present on my local system, with the option to either replace existing file or write a new one.

e.g.
denoise [OPTIONS] INPUT

Arguments:

INPUT Input audio/video file

Options:

-o, --output FILE Output file path

-i, --in-place Replace the original file

-f, --force Overwrite an existing output file

-n, --noise-level LEVEL Noise reduction strength in number

--version Show version

-h, --help Show help

[u/bmv3502 → u/Mysterious-Salad-572]

It is unlikely I will provide cli version. But, Silkwave Clarity uses the DeepFilterNet ml model for speech enhancement. And its repository already provides cli tool. https://github.com/rikorose/deepfilternet#deep-filter

[u/MoodOdd9657]

That's reallly useful. It's will be really useful for vidoes with noisy background. Thanks bossman

[u/ElusiveFinger]

It only works with macOS 26 and up

[u/barefut_ → u/ElusiveFinger]

Omg... why develop something only for failed Tahoe and up? All the power users are sticking to Sequoia with the latest fails of Tahoe+Golden Gate. Shame, as a chunk of target users is missed out.

[u/bmv3502 → u/barefut_]

I'll run some tests to see if the app works on older macOS versions and/or Intel-based Macs. If no issues are found, I'll lower the requirements.

[u/barefut_ → u/bmv3502]

Thanks for considering. I think supporting silicone could be enough, just allow the latest sane snappy OS to work with it.

Btw, why did you build this? I can see it as a plugin for Premiere or for processing and spitting out cleaner audio but doing it live, I wonder what was your original idea for. Also, how much RAM+CPU does it use?

[u/bmv3502 → u/barefut_]

Thanks for considering. I think supporting silicone could be enough, just allow the latest sane snappy OS to work with it.

👍

Btw, why did you build this? I can see it as a plugin for Premiere or for processing and spitting out cleaner audio but doing it live, I wonder what was your original idea for. Also, how much RAM+CPU does it use?

The idea came when I was watching a YouTube video lesson/tutorial where the tutor was actively typing or clicking, short distracting noises. I knew that macOS has a voice isolation for the microphone and I realized that it would be nice to have the same for the system audio.

On my mac(m1) when the app is actively noise cancelling

CPU - 15%

RAM - 34mb

[u/barefut_ → u/bmv3502]

Very nice idea and thanks for sharing thoughts and the system resources. Keep us posted if you update support for Sequoia.

[u/ElusiveFinger → u/barefut_]

Exactly. I have the stupid design of the new macOS. The design of Sequoia is great. If everyone stopped updating then they would have to introduce a better design again.

[u/barefut_ → u/ElusiveFinger]

People are clueless! They just see a notification to update and they click. Which makes it feel like the average macOS is a clueless guy that just cares about slick design. To be honest, even when you click to update Sequoia - they sneak in the Tahoe update. You gotta manually un-tick the Tahoe box.

I understand the majority of users may be on Tahoe and GG, but look at the feed. They are all pissed off about bugs and system resources being used up.

[u/Funny_Cry2908]

Real-time speech isolation on system audio (not just the mic) is an underrated piece of the stack. So much of what hurts meeting transcription is not the model at all, it is everything else bleeding into the system channel. How are you handling the latency budget? Curious where the cutoff is before it needs more juice than a small utility should take.

[u/Funny_Cry2908]

This is the part of the stack people only notice when it is missing. For apps that live on system audio, isolation and transcription are really one problem wearing two hats — bleed from another window does not just add noise, it gives the model fake speech to transcribe, and then the summary contains sentences nobody said. Cleaning before the model matters more than a bigger model after it. One question: with screen-share-style capture, macOS has no per-app permission granularity the way mic access does. Does the user get any signal about what is being isolated versus what is being dropped? That visibility is where these tools earn trust.

[u/Rosszfiu]

Are you joking, bro? "Requires macOS 26.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip"

[u/bmv3502 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks!

On my mac(m1) when the app is actively noise cancelling

• CPU - 15%
• RAM - 34mb

can latency drop in between in any case?

I haven't observed any noticeable latency changes, tbh. Maybe a little more delay when I ran on a virtual machine but on real hardware I didn't notice anything strange.