I tried Samsung’s new Audio Eraser and I’m a little disappointed

I love Google’s Magic Eraser. I’ve been using it since its earliest days when it was happy to erase a person or an object, but it didn’t really know how to fill the space. Now, though, Magic Eraser has evolved to a point where it handles photos easily and is trying to clean up the audio in some of your favorite clips as part of the larger Magic Editor umbrella. And, in the tech world, that’s a surefire way to have a feature copied by your closest rivals. So, when Samsung launched its take on Audio Magic Eraser, called Audio Eraser, I had to give it a try. Here’s how it went.

In a word, yes. Samsung’s Audio Eraser is almost identical to Google’s Audio Magic Eraser, from how you access it to the level of control you have over your audio. In fact, the two even look similar, segmenting your clip into categories like music, voices, noise, and wind — each of which you can adjust individually. And, if you’re like me and can’t consider yourself an audio expert, both editing tools offer an Auto button, which will do its best to balance the sound for you.

However, just because the broad strokes of Audio Eraser and Audio Magic Eraser are pretty similar doesn’t mean that they’re direct clones. For starters, Samsung’s Galaxy AI processes its audio on-device, so you should be able to use its Audio Eraser just about anywhere. That could come in handy if you’re out in the woods and want to enhance (or dull) the sounds of nature while away from a reliable cellular network. Google’s service, on the other hand, uses the cloud to process audio, sending your clips off-device and making the feature more challenging to use with spotty coverage.

Unfortunately, that reliance on the cloud gives Google’s Audio Magic Eraser another pretty strict limitation: You can only process clips shorter than two minutes. For most people, that won’t matter too much — I rarely take long phone videos in my day-to-day life. As an avid climber, even if I record a scamper up the wall, I’m usually to the top of the problem and back down long before the time limit, as you’ll see in a second.

However, Google’s two-minute countdown makes some of those special occasions in life much tougher. Say, for example, that you’re headed to a concert and want to grab a video of your favorite song, like my colleague Hadlee did when he saw Brand New perform in 2017. He dutifully held his Lumia 1020 high above the crowd for nearly five minutes while they played The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot, only to realize later how loud and off-key the concertgoer beside him was. Sadly, when he later tried to upload the video to Google Photos for some music magic, he found that he could only cover one half of the song at a time.

Samsung’s Audio Eraser, on the other hand, doesn’t have that limit. Because everything happens on-device, you can upload and process much longer clips, allowing you to clean up the song from start to finish. How well the finished product turns out varies greatly depending on the quality of the original video, but I’m certainly saying there’s a chance you could pull off an impressive cleanup. Of course, that also means you’ll need a more powerful processor to handle Samsung’s Galaxy AI demands, which is why Audio Eraser remains a flagship-only feature.

Now that you have a basic idea of how Samsung’s Audio Eraser works, let’s test it. As you might have guessed, the two scenarios I referenced above are exactly the ways I decided to test the AI-powered tool. In the interest of being thorough, I added Google’s Audio Magic Eraser to the mix for good measure. So, in the clips you see below, you’ll get the original audio, followed by Samsung’s attempt at a cleanup, and then followed by Google’s shot at the same.

Up first, I decided to give the Galaxy S25 Ultra what I thought would be an easy test. I figured that taking it to an indoor climbing gym would reduce some of the noise, and shooting directly from my Samsung flagship would guarantee good enough video quality. As it turns out, I was only partially correct. From a video quality perspective, my trip up an orange V3 route looks excellent — it’s sharp, and I stay comfortably in the frame the entire time. However, from an Audio Eraser point of view, I’m a little disappointed.

In the original clip, you can easily make out a few people chatting in the background and the clattering of someone dropping a heavy barbell just a few seconds in. No big deal, it’s a gym, this stuff happens. But, when I let Audio Eraser do its thing, I found that Samsung’s treatment made it sound like I was listening to everything with a cup pressed over my ear. The voices were muffled but not erased, and the clang of the weights gained reverb rather than softening to a gentle crash. You can also easily make out the start of Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel, which is a great song but not necessarily the soundtrack I was hoping for.

Perhaps worse for Samsung is that Google’s Audio Magic Eraser processed the scene much better. No, it didn’t completely erase any of the sounds, but it reduced the key annoyances I mentioned above without distorting the remaining audio. You can once again still hear a bit of the background chatter and the fall of the barbell, but they’re consistently softer. My only real complaint with Google’s treatment, though, is the fact that it couldn’t quite face the music. It didn’t seem entirely sure whether to amplify or erase Gerry Rafferty’s vocals, softening the song at first but bringing it back to full strength shortly after.

Despite the initial stumbles on what I thought would be an easy test, I decided to keep going with both Audio Eraser and Audio Magic Eraser. After all, I owed it to my buddy Hadlee to see if we could make his Brand New memories sound, well, brand-new. Unfortunately, I’d have to say that both Google and Samsung had just as much trouble this time around, but they traded strengths for weaknesses.

This time, Samsung’s Audio Eraser ditched its strange reverb effect, replacing it with muffled vocals and instrumentation. At a few points, it seems as though the Galaxy S25 Ultra could not distinguish between the cheering fans and the drums, and at around 42 seconds into the clip, it even decided that vocalist Jesse Lacey was part of the crowd rather than standing onstage. Granted, Samsung’s Galaxy AI quickly realized its mistake, bringing Lacey back to full volume a few seconds later, but the constant volume changes don’t make the audio any easier to listen to.

To its credit, Google doesn’t mute Lacey partway through its processing, but it falls into the reverb trap that it escaped in the climbing gym. For whatever reason, it doesn’t seem entirely confident in reducing the noise of the crowd all the way, leaving just enough of the annoying, off-pitch fan to Hadlee’s right side for my liking. Bear in mind, this is the result with a few of Google’s sliders turned as low as they’ll go — all the way to -100. Had I left some of them a bit higher, the balance might have been better, but I would have kept more of the crowd in addition to sharper vocals, which wasn’t my goal.

So, there you go — a slightly underwhelming end to an initially hopeful experiment. Given my love for the standard Magic Eraser (and Samsung’s Object Eraser), I thought the video version would be further along. I realize that feeding an eight-year-old clip through both my Pixel 9 Pro and Galaxy S25 Ultra might have been asking for a bit too much magic, but it doesn’t explain the similar struggles with a video shot natively on Samsung’s most capable camera setup.

Yet, I’m sure this is only the start for Audio Magic Eraser and Audio Eraser. Both Google and Samsung will likely upgrade their erasers soon, and I’ll just have to wait patiently for the finished product to get a bit sharper.