Studio-Quality Audio for Everyone: An Interview with Xound Founder Philipp Seeser

Audio is everywhere – in YouTube videos, TikTok Reels, webinars, podcasts, sales pitches, online courses, and Teams calls. No matter how good cameras have become over time, one problem has always remained the same: the audio is the weakest part of the recording. Room reverberation, background noise, muffled voices, inconsistent volume levels – until now, anyone who wanted to get a handle on these issues needed either a studio or hours of post-production work.

Philipp Seeser has addressed this problem with Xound. The concept is incredibly simple: Upload an audio file – or have it processed without uploading – and after just a few moments, you’ll get a file that sounds like a professional recording. One click – no audio engineering knowledge required.

For media professionals and individuals alike: The daily audio companion tool

Philipp, how did Xound come about?

Philipp Seeser: The reality is still that audio quality is often the weakest link in content production. We now have smartphones with 4K cameras, but audio remains a challenge. That’s how the idea came about to use a machine-learning model focused solely on improving audio – without requiring you to be a sound engineer. One click – and the result is ready to publish.

Who mainly uses Xound?

Philipp: Small agencies, individual content creators, but also parents who want to record their kids playing soccer and remove wind noise. So it’s not always about commercial use – it’s about personal use. In general, I’d say: Xound is for people who regularly publish audio and want to make the process as easy as possible.

Xound promotes local processing – no uploads, everything on the device. But the Studio Plan includes GPU processing, which sounds like it involves a server. How much of it actually runs locally?

Philipp: The basic idea was to process everything locally, and that works very well up to a certain point. Audio files up to 15 minutes long work without any problems. With longer files, however, we had customer inquiries saying, “Privacy is great, but I want a result in three minutes.” For those customers, there’s the cloud-based option using a GPU. The basic principle – local processing whenever possible – remains the same.

Everything Except Voice Cloning: The Tool Should Be Used Responsibly

You introduced voice cloning and then removed it. Why?

Philipp: It’s better to solve one problem excellently than to solve many problems only halfway. Voice cloning is a field of its own; there are specialists who have far surpassed us in that area. And it has also become an ethical and political issue: Voice is a marker of identity, and trust is very important here. Voice cloning is being abused in many ways. That’s why we didn’t want to offer a product.

Xound is bootstrapped – no external funding, not a full-time project. Why?

Philipp: The product has to prove itself first. We need to clarify: What are users paying for, and how do we solve their problems? Even with all the AI hype as a buzzword: It shouldn’t be just an AI demo – it should create real value. The product has been generating revenue for just under three years – and the U.S. market accounts for about eighty percent of that.

What do you want Xound to be in two years that it isn’t today?

Philipp: A product that significantly improves the standard workflow – professional-quality sound with a single click, even when there’s music playing in the background or when you want to intentionally keep certain sounds. And we want to strengthen our privacy architecture: desktop apps for Windows and Mac that process everything entirely locally. Because there are already customers who cite exactly that as the reason they use Xound.