About AudioForges

Why this exists

AudioForges started from a simple frustration: every time I needed to pull a reference track, check its key before sampling it, or get a clean instrumental to practice over, I ended up on some ad-plastered downloader site, or paying for a tool that did one thing I needed buried inside ten I didn't. So I built the pieces I actually use — a YouTube-to-audio converter first, then a key and BPM detector, then a vocal remover — and put them somewhere free for anyone else running into the same problem. The site has since grown into a full set of free audio tools covering conversion, editing, pitch and tempo, tuning, BPM, metronome practice, cleanup, separation and transcription — but the bar for adding anything new stays the same as day one.

How the tools work

YouTube to WAV/MP3 extracts the audio track from a video URL server-side and hands you back a WAV (lossless, 44.1kHz) or MP3 (320kbps) file.

Key & BPM Finder runs uploaded audio through key-detection and beat-tracking models to identify musical key, tempo, and Camelot notation for harmonic mixing.

Vocal Removeruses real source-separation processing to split a track into vocal and instrumental stems — not a simple center-channel filter, which only partially removes vocals and often damages the mix. Separation runs on GPU-accelerated infrastructure, so it's rate-limited per person to keep it available for everyone — 6 per hour at standard quality, which is free with no account. Studio Quality runs a heavier model that costs real money per run; everyone gets free runs of it each month, and beyond that it takes a credit.

Transcription runs on Whisper large-v3, the largest model in that family, on a GPU worker. Three routes into it: Audio to Text for a file you already have, YouTube to Text for a link, and Video to Text for an MP4 or MOV without extracting the audio first. All three detect the spoken language or let you set it, translate to English on request, and export plain text, SRT or VTT.

BPM Tapper lets you tap along to a beat and calculates its tempo from the intervals between taps. Online Metronome provides adjustable BPM and time signature controls for practice, while its scheduler uses the browser's audio clock to keep clicks precise. Instrument Tuner uses your microphone to detect the pitch of a played note and shows the nearest note, octave, and cents sharp or flat directly in the browser.

Beyond these, the toolset covers everyday editing tasks — format conversion, trimming, volume adjustment, reversing, pitch shifting, and tempo changes — plus cleanup tools purpose-built for different jobs: a general-purpose noise remover with adjustable strength, a one-click Voice Cleaner tuned specifically for speech, an echo remover for mild room echo, and a silence remover that strips dead air throughout a whole recording. Every tool follows the same rule as the original three: it exists because it solved a real problem in an actual production or editing session, not because it filled a gap in a feature list.

Who's behind it

AudioForges is built and maintained by a solo developer who is also a music producer working in melodic house and electronic styles. Every tool here exists because I needed it myself first — that's the bar for adding anything new to the site.

Keeping it free

There are no ads on this site and no accounts. Servers, GPU time and bandwidth come out of my own pocket, offset by voluntary support via Ko-fi.

Almost everything here is free and stays that way — conversion, editing, cleanup, analysis, practice tools, transcription, and standard vocal removal and stem splitting, all with full-quality downloads and no watermark. The tools that run on GPU time carry fair-use caps per person rather than an account, so one person can't tie up a shared machine.

The single exception is Studio Quality separation. It runs a much heavier model, it costs real money every time it runs, and giving it away without limit isn't something one person paying out of pocket can sustain. So everyone gets free runs of it each month, and past that it takes a credit — bought once, never expiring, with nothing recurring to cancel. If a run fails, the credit comes back automatically. Nothing else on the site is limited to push you toward it.

Questions, feedback, or a tool you wish existed? Get in touch.