Noise Blocker vs Noise Gator

Noise Blocker is a Windows app that reduces unwanted microphone sounds in real time, including fan noise, keyboard sounds, clicks, hiss, and room noise. Version 3 uses AI to distinguish a speaker’s voice from background sound and is designed for everyday laptops. The maker says the app needs no tuning or complicated setup. It is listed as compatible with Zoom, Google Meet, Discord, Slack, Teams, and OBS, and supports microphone audio for recording and streaming. Noise Blocker supports Windows 10 and Windows 11; other operating systems are not currently supported. Processing adds about 80 milliseconds of latency, which varies by system. The free version provides 30 minutes of blocking per week without an email requirement. A Personal license is a one-time payment of $50 for one person on up to three PCs, with 12 months of updates and priority support, indefinite use of covered versions, and a 14-day money-back guarantee. A 30-day business trial for up to 20 employees or computers requires a request and approval; no card is required.

Noise Gator processes microphone audio in real time to reduce noise, then sends the cleaned signal to a virtual audio device for other apps. It is free under the MIT license and runs on Windows and macOS. Discord, Teams, and Zoom are named as apps that can use the virtual device as a microphone input. DeepFilterNet is the default denoising engine, with dual-pass RNNoise as a lighter fallback. The audio pipeline also includes a highpass filter, suppression control, a voice-activity-driven noise gate, three-band EQ, and automatic gain normalization. Bluetooth headset audio is supported, and the device menu refreshes when devices connect or disconnect. The app can install VB-Cable on Windows or BlackHole on macOS automatically. Prebuilt binaries are available from GitHub Releases; the ZIP includes the executable and ONNX Runtime DLL. DeepFilterNet’s runtime and an approximately 8 MB model download on first use, with SHA256 verification. Settings are saved to a TOML file for the next launch, and headless mode supports scripted or server use. The latest listed release is v0.1.2. Building from source requires stable Rust 1.85 or later, plus MinGW-w64 or MSVC on Windows.