Remove [sounds] and speaker names from subtitles
Downloaded subtitles are often the SDH/HI version — made for Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, with sound descriptions and speaker labels baked into every scene. If you can hear the audio, those annotations are clutter. This free tool strips them in one pass.
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Before / after
[TENSE MUSIC PLAYING]
JOHN: We need to leave.
(SIGHS) <i>Right now.</i>
↓
We need to leave.
Right now.
What gets removed
- Bracketed sound descriptions —
[music],[door slams],[speaking French]. - All-caps parentheticals —
(SIGHS),(DOOR SLAMS). Lower-case parentheses in real dialogue are left alone. - Speaker labels — leading
JOHN:/MAN 2:prefixes (all-caps only, so dialogue like "Warning: stay back" survives). - Formatting tags —
<i>,<font>, ASS-style{\an8}position codes. - Leftovers — cues that end up empty are dropped, numbering is fixed, and stray double spaces are normalized.
Each of these is a separate checkbox, so you can e.g. strip sound descriptions but keep italics. There's also an optional overlapping-timestamp fix and a find & replace (plain or regex) for anything pattern-based the presets miss.
How to clean a file
- Open Subtitle Toolbox and drop in your
.srtor.vttfile. - Under Clean, tick what you want removed (the defaults cover the standard SDH clutter).
- Click Clean it, check the output, then Download. The file stays in its original format.
Honest limits
SDH conventions vary between studios. Heuristics catch the overwhelmingly common patterns above, but unusual styles (mixed-case speaker names, multi-line sound descriptions split across cues) can slip through — skim the result, and use find & replace for stragglers. Your original file is never modified, so experimenting is free.