What is Room Tone Audio? Plus 10 Royalty Free Room Tone Downloads for Polished Video Soundtracks
Jourdan Aldredge
Apr 30, 2025
In the earliest days of filmmaking, there was no sound or audio. While called the “silent film era” for a reason, it was actually a bit of a misnomer because the earliest films did have sound—it was just played live as an accompaniment either by a piano or sometimes a full orchestra.
As film and video technology evolved, so did sound and audio recording. Today, most cameras and smartphones can record both high-quality video and audio simultaneously. However, as any seasoned video editor can attest, just because recording sound is feasible these days, capturing usable audio is another matter.
Many inexperienced filmmakers, video professionals, and other content creators often record audio with issues. To help cover these issues, room tone audio is a great and easy solution.
But what is room tone? Let’s explore this term and provide you with some royalty free room tone tracks to consider using in your videos and edits.
What is Room Tone?
Before we dive into providing you with some room tone tracks to listen to and see if they’re right for your projects, let’s go over some basics about this term, what it means, and how you can use room tone.
As you might guess from context clues, room tone simply refers to a room’s ambient sound. For example, if you’re sitting in a busy coffee shop, the room tone would sound as such with people murmuring, coffee machines whirring, and perhaps soft music playing in the background.
In the film and video production world, room tone refers to the base audio level that audio crews record while on a set or out on location. Why is room tone important? Precisely because this room tone audio can then be used later in post-production by editors or sound engineers to fill in gaps, cover mistakes, or provide an accurate and believable background layer for scenes and projects.
Best Royalty Free Room Tone Tracks
With that basic definition out of the way, the next best way to explain what room tone is is to let you hear some examples. If you’re already familiar with room tone and curious to find the right room tone track for your videos and projects, we have you covered here as well.
Below are ten high-quality room tone tracks that would be great options to use in any of your films, videos, or other types of content. So, take a look at the examples below and see if any might be right for you.
Description: Air conditioner with exhaust air hose sucking warm air out of a medium-sized room.
Description: Boiler room of a large office building with constant hum from vents.
Description: Descending, subtle hum of a modern elevator in a large office building. Crackling and roaring.
Description: Loud PC ventilators running in a medium-sized room. Constant buzzing noise.
Description: Low eerie drone of large machine room.
Description: Sci-fi spaceship engine hum.
Description: Buzzing and hissing of running laptops and computers with loud fan noise in a medium-sized space.
Description: Hum and buzz from an old ticket vending machine. Rattling, distant rumble and traffic.
Description: Tall corridor leading to a spacious train station. Ventilation system and trains far in the background.
Description: Very few people moving and coughing in a courtroom.
Those tracks are just a few royalty free room tone options for you to consider. If you’d like to further explore more room tone track options, here’s a playlist from our room tone library full of more tracks to check out.
What does “royalty free” mean?
Before we hustle over to more tips for how to use room tone tracks in your videos, let’s quickly go over what this term “royalty free” means in case you aren’t familiar with it. Royalty free basically means that it is music or audio that has had its copyrights properly licensed for you.
That’s why your top option for music or sound effects (or other video or photo assets, for that matter) is royalty free audio that can be licensed from music licensing websites like Soundstripe.
This is because sound effects, like songs and other musical tracks, are created by artists who deserve compensation. Companies like Soundstripe both compensate the artists who create the music and provide full protection and coverage for creators to use the music and sound effects on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, and others.
How to use Room Tone in your videos
Let’s move on now to explore how to actually use room tone tracks in your videos and projects. As mentioned at the start, most of the time, room tone is recorded by productions while they are actually on set or on location. However, there are many cases where this isn’t an option. And, furthermore, there are many instances where room tone might have been recorded, but something about it doesn’t work.
The main way room tone is used in sound design is to create a base background layer for your audio. Regardless of your scene or setting, if you want your videos or content to feel more immersive and lived in, adding a naturalistic room tone sound that matches the vibe of your scene is the best way to give your project realistic audio.
You can still add more soundtracks or bgm to your videos, too, but having that base layer room tone behind everything will help viewers feel like they’re actually there in the scene in real life.
More resources for using room tone and audio in your projects
There’s obviously a lot more to explore about the nuances of how to edit sound in a video, but for a quick guide, it usually works best to pick a room tone at the start of your edit. Add that room tone to the background of your videos, then layer more audio, sounds, and music on top of it as you proceed.
To help you learn and explore the art of how to use sound and music in your videos, plus other editing insights and guides, here are some additional resources to check out on the Soundstripe blog.