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Company: Ville Sorsa
Product: RFX Room Tones
Our Rating: 4.5/5
Price: £38
RFX Room Tones, the latest Sound Library from the experienced Ville Sorsa, offers a useful variety of room tone effects to Freelance Sound Designers and Post Production Houses. After we received our review copy, we put the library through its paces in various projects.
Opening Our Copy
Upon opening we were glad to see a nicely organised, well named and simplistic file structure. We also liked the amount of content on offer, each file is in stereo WAV format at 5 minutes long and has metadata which means you have more than enough content for atmosphere tracklay. The files were named accurately and had the feel of a much more expensive library. A small gripe was that when the package was unzipped, I would have liked to see a parent folder with the name of the library.
Tone It Down
Bare in mind that most people are not going to get excited about a room tone library, but you should. I was sceptical at first, but upon listening, I found each sound to have no extraneous noises or clicks unless stated. This means you are getting the pure noise floor of the room, which is what this is all about. The sounds have an element of rawness, but are still clean in the right way. They are balanced with each other, when editing with them side by side in tracklay, you'll notice there are no frequencies standing out and minimal level difference.
No audible spectral processing has taken place and care was obviously taken when picking the locations to record. These sounds are especially useful when the client wants 'silence' within a scene. Usually when the dialogue track sounds too dry and you need that extra magic that fills the gap. I also think it could be useful for dialogue editing, certain sections can be very time consuming to generate 'fill' and often, a similar room tone from RFX will save you lots of time. The sounds here are perfect for designing Sci-Fi ambiences and the like, as they're so clean and well recorded. At 96kHz there will be minimal quality loss when pitch shifting.
Room For Improvement
For the library, I would have liked to see both a mono and stereo option, but can see why this didn't make sense given the file size. I also would like to have seen external ambiences with the same vibe (no extraneous noises), but it would be more difficult to achieve consistency and reduce extraneous sounds; maybe in RFX 2: External Tones?
The price doesn't seem expensive once you open the library, but also doesn't feel like exceptional value, it is priced according to its worth. It is arguably more of a utility tool than a creative library, which is why I think it had to be priced at this point. Anything that can add to the perceived value in future products would be great.
The Bottom Line
For a good price you get a tool that does it's job extremely well, it has had care put into it and is demonstrating demand with high sales rates. It's pretty much a must have tool for all Sound Designers who need to tracklay atmosphere effects.