Clean Up
Clean Up is a free, instant, fully offline pass that fixes common subtitle problems using pattern matching — no AI model, no internet connection, no usage cost. It is a different feature from AI Clean Up, which uses DeepSeek.
Opening it
Open Tools → Clean Up. It works on one subtitle file at a time: drop a file or use the Add button, choose options, check the preview, then Save or Save as…. It needs no license. To clean many files, use the Clean up step in a workflow. Unlike the other cue tools, Clean Up may remove or merge subtitles, and an ASS file is still written back in place.
Content removal
| Metadata tags (on) | Strips bracketed tags like [Music], [Silence], [Applause]. |
|---|---|
| SDH descriptions (on) | Strips parenthetical sound descriptions like (sighs), (door slams), (laughs). |
| Speaker labels (off) | Strips name prefixes like JOHN:, - MARY:, <SPEAKER>. |
| Music & lyrics (off) | Strips song-lyric markers. |
| Credit lines (on) | Strips lines like “Subtitles by…”, “Synced by…”. |
| Narrative markers (off) | Strips recap text like “Previously on…”, “Next time…”. |
| Ads & promotions (on) | Strips URLs, @handles and #hashtags. |
Text cleanup
| Fix encoding (on) | Repairs garbled characters from misread encodings. |
|---|---|
| Remove HTML (on) | Strips tags like <i>, <b>, <font>. |
| Normalize quotes (on) | Converts curly quotes to straight ones. |
| Fix OCR errors (off) | Heuristic character fixes (for example “l” → “I”, “rn” → “m”). Use with caution — it can occasionally over-correct. |
| Lowercase ALL CAPS (off) | Converts fully capitalised lines to lowercase. |
Timing fixes and duplicates
| Fix overlaps (on) | Repairs overlapping timestamps between consecutive subtitles. |
|---|---|
| Min duration | The minimum time a subtitle stays on screen. |
| Min gap | The minimum gap between consecutive subtitles. |
| Remove repetitive (on) | Limits identical repeated lines to a maximum number of copies. |
| Merge similar (on) | Combines consecutive near-duplicate entries. |
Quick presets
Four presets set the whole options panel at once: Default, For translation (adds SDH, speaker label and music removal so translation gets clean dialogue), Light clean (a minimal pass) and Aggressive (SDH, speaker labels, music, narrative removal and OCR-error fixing for the most thorough pass). Nothing is changed until you choose something, and the preview table shows exactly which subtitles will change before you save.