Bleep out swear words free, online
Upload a recording and get a clean version back: every swear word on the built-in list that the transcript finds, beeped, muted or cut out on the exact word, after you have reviewed the list.
Last updated: September 2026
You see the full list with timestamps first and decide word by word. Free, no account, no watermark.
No account. 10 recordings a day. Files up to 60 minutes here, and it resets at midnight.
Plain transcript and subtitles right here. Bleeping, translation and burned-in subtitles live in the full tool.
Why bleeping swear words by hand is so slow
The censoring itself is easy. Finding the words is the job: scrubbing an hour of audio, dropping a marker on every f***, lining a tone up with a word that lasts a third of a second, and doing it again when you miss one. An hour of podcast is an evening in an editor.
ScribeGrab flips the order round. It transcribes your file first, and hands back a start and end time for every individual word. So the swearing is already found and already timed before you touch anything: all that's left is your decision about what happens to it.
Bleeping out swear words this way, starting from a full transcript instead of scrubbing the waveform, is what turns an evening job into a few minutes. The result plays back with censored swear words exactly where the original ones were, just muted, beeped or cut instead of spoken.
Beep, mute or cut a swear word: and you decide which, word by word
Three options, and the difference matters more than it sounds:
- Beep, the classic 1 kHz tone over the word. Everyone hears that something was censored, and the rhythm of the sentence survives.
- Silence, the word drops to zero and nothing replaces it. Cleaner and less comic, but a listener may think the audio glitched.
- Cut it out, the word is removed and the recording gets shorter. Best when the swearing is filler rather than part of the sentence.
Every option lands on the word itself, plus a hair either side, because a transcriber's word boundary can sit a few hundredths of a second too tight.
Automatic censoring goes wrong in the same way every time: it doesn't know a name from an insult, or a quote from an outburst. So ScribeGrab shows you the list before it changes anything: every hit with its timestamp, written as f***, and one click leaves any of them in. Milder words (d***, h***, c***) sit behind their own switch and are off by default. A swear in a podcast is not the same problem as a swear in a school video, and that's your call, not ours.
Your video keeps its quality
If you only beep or mute, nothing happens to the picture at all: the video stream is copied over untouched, so there is no second generation of compression and no quality loss. Only cutting forces the picture to be re-encoded, because the frames themselves change.
Audio comes back as MP3; video comes back in its own container (MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM), or as MP4 if you chose to cut.
What it listens for
The strong list covers the everyday English swearing and slurs plus the most common Dutch, German, Spanish and French words, matched on whole words only, so "assessment", "hello" and "cocktail" are never touched. It is deliberately not a complete dictionary of everything anyone has ever said: check the list it shows you before you download.
While you're there you can also cut the "um"s and the long silences out of the same file, and the transcript, subtitles and speaker labels come with it either way.
By Sam Ridder, I build and run ScribeGrab on my own hardware, on my own. Who I am.
Sources
- Bleep censor - Wikipedia: Bleeping replaces profanity with a bleep sound
Frequently asked
Is it really free to censor a whole podcast episode?
Yes. Up to 60 minutes and 1.5 GB per file, 10 recordings a day, no account and no watermark on the result. Ads pay for the GPU.
Can I stop it bleeping a word?
Yes. The list of found words is shown with timestamps before anything is rendered; click a word and it stays in the recording exactly as it was.
What if it misses a word?
It only knows the words on its list, and a very muffled word can be transcribed wrong. You always get the transcript too, so search it if you want to be sure.
Do you keep my recording?
No. Ticking the clean-version box keeps your file on the server for this job instead of deleting it straight after transcribing, and then everything, original and result, is wiped within 45 minutes (24 hours with any pass, free or paid). See privacy.
Which languages does it censor?
It transcribes about 100 languages. The swear-word list itself is English plus the most common Dutch, German, Spanish and French words.
Can I bleep out swear words in video, not just audio?
Yes. MP4, MOV, MKV and WebM work as well as any audio file, and you get the same container back. The picture quality stays exactly the same unless you choose to cut words out, because only then is the video re-encoded: removing frames changes the video itself.
How is this different from bleeping in CapCut or Premiere Pro?
In CapCut or Premiere Pro you find every word yourself on the timeline and line a beep up with it. Here the transcript finds and times the words first, so all you do is choose what happens to each one. Editing in one of those apps anyway? Run the file through here first and import the clean version.
Is there an app to bleep out swear words in a video at all?
You don't need one. ScribeGrab runs in any phone or desktop browser, so there is nothing to install.
Can it bleep out bad words in a home video, not just a podcast?
Yes. It is one bad word censor for any recording: a home video, a stream clip, a voice memo or a podcast episode all go through the same list.
Related: Podcast clip for social media.
How to bleep out words on Instagram story
Export the story as a video file, run it through ScribeGrab to bleep the words, then upload the cleaned clip to Instagram. Instagram itself has no built-in word bleeping.
What does the bleep sound like?
A 1 kHz tone, the classic broadcast censor beep, and the swear beep is the same every time. Don't want a tone? Choose mute or cut instead.
Does the cuss word censor catch milder words too, or just the strong ones?
Only the strong ones, unless you switch the milder words on. They sit behind their own switch, off by default.
Does the swear censor work with background music playing?
It finds the words as long as the voice is clear over the music. During each bleeped word the whole soundtrack drops out under the beep, music included, for that fraction of a second; the music around it plays on.
How long does it take to censor curse words in a full podcast episode?
About the same as transcribing it: a couple of minutes per hour of audio, then you review the list.
Once a word is bleeped out, can the original be recovered from the download?
No. The download only holds the censored version, and the file you uploaded is never changed on your side: keep your original if you might need it later.
Does it bleep out curse words, not just swearing?
Yes. Curse words and swear words are the same strong list here, so to bleep out cuss words you upload the file and every hit is found and timestamped the same way. Milder words are a separate switch.
How to bleep out words in a video without scrubbing the audio by hand?
Upload the file and it is transcribed first, so every swear word on the list comes with a start and end time. You then choose beep, mute or cut for each word. The picture stays untouched if you only beep or mute.