Everything runs on your machine — no uploads, no per-hour meter, no queue. See what a licence costs →
About us

Software you bought should keep working

Sonic Refine is one person building one desktop tool properly: taking a rough recording and making it sound finished — and handling the video around it — on your own machine, without a subscription and without your files ever leaving your desk.

What I hold to

Three decisions the whole product follows from

The free tier is a real product

No key, no account, no sign-up — install it and it works, running the same models a licence does. What a licence lifts is room to work: hours, devices, video resolution, export formats, the watermark, smart reframe, files in one go. The quality of the cleanup itself was never the thing being held back.

I never see what you are working on

Your files are opened, processed and written back on your own disk. Nothing about them — not the audio, not the names, not even how long they are — is sent anywhere. Licensing requests carry a key and a device identifier because that is all the API accepts.

The work belongs on your computer

No upload step, no queue on someone else's server, no file-size ceiling but your own disk. That is also the cheapest privacy guarantee there is: a file that never leaves cannot leak.

A recording is almost never finished when you stop recording. There is a fan in the background, a breath before every sentence, and four seconds of nothing where somebody found their place again.

Why I built it

Cleaning that up by hand is slow, and the tools that do it for you mostly want your file first. You upload a recording you have not released yet, wait in a queue behind strangers, and pay by the hour for the privilege. For a podcast episode that is irritating. For a client's unreleased work it is a conversation you should not have to have.

So the whole thing runs on your own computer. The same models the cloud tools use, running on your CPU, with no upload and no queue — and the video side in the same window, because the file you cleaned is usually the file you also need to compress, convert or reframe.

What I do differently about renewals

Renewing extends the licence you already hold. The same key, the same activated devices, nothing to copy and paste again. And when a licence does lapse, the app drops to the free tier rather than locking — taking the whole product away from someone who paid last year is how you lose the renewal as well as the goodwill.

There is no stored card. Nothing charges automatically. You renew when you decide to, or you do not, and either way the software you installed still opens.

Using it responsibly

This is a general-purpose tool, and what it is used on is the user's decision and the user's responsibility. The licence agreement asks you to hold the rights, or the permission, for anything you process with it: your own recordings and footage, work a client has engaged you to edit, and openly licensed or public-domain material.

If you are not sure whether you may save something, the answer is that you should not until you are.

Talking to me

Support is me. If something is broken, unclear or missing, write to me or email support@sonicrefine.com. It reaches the person who wrote the code, and I usually reply within one business day.

See whether it suits you

The free tier is not a trial that expires. Use it, and buy a licence only if the ceiling starts getting in your way.

What this is built on

The processing runs on your machine, and it runs on work other people published openly. Nothing here is trained by me or licensed privately — every piece below is free software, used under a licence that permits commercial use, and named because those licences ask to be named.

There is deliberately no GPL or AGPL code anywhere in the app, which is why some better-known components are missing from this list. The full licence texts ship with the application.