What’s the Best Ambience Replacement Plugin?

Working with room tone is usually a part of audio post production. If the sound team has done a good job at the recording and filming stage, then things are easier. If not, you may be more reliant on a specific software tool to improve your results and your workflow. If so, tools can majorly speed up your workflow when your material is good, making it quicker and easier to produce great results.

Here are five tools that can help audio editors working with dialogue editing to achieve better results – whether you’ve been handed easy-to-use source audio or not!

Undertone 2

Our own plugin is an excellent option for replacing ambience when editing dialogue. Undertone automatically takes parts of a background noise file and extends the sound into an infinite bed so that there’s no tedious editing for you.

Undertone can even load an original recording including dialogue, and will intelligently ignore the dialogue to arrive at the correct noise profile from the file, making things even easier for you. Find out How Undertone works in just five minutes for a better impression of how to get started.

The plugin comes in VST, AU, AAX and AudioSuite versions, so can work with all major DAWs including Pro Tools, with which it integrates well.

Undertone 2 Pros

• Excellent room tone matching
• More complex ambiences and scapes can be created
• Comes with in-built presets 
• Single-time purchase as an individual plugin

Undertone 2 Cons

• Might be too powerful for basic users (who should try Undertone Lite, see below)

iZotope Ambience Match (in iZotope RX)

Ambience Match is a module in iZotope’s RX 11 Advanced audio restoration software. It also comes as its own plugin that installs with the entire package. At the time of writing this, there was no way to get Ambience Match without getting the entire RX Advanced package alongside it.

The module can analyze a given ambience profile using its Learn button, and can work in Static and Complex modes. Ambience Match has controls for variation, with Movement and Randomness sliders, and it can help set thresholds and gain levels.

Plugin Pros

• Good results as part of a whole audio project
• RX can load as an ARA plugin in a supporting DAW

Plugin Cons

• Must be bought as part of a larger package
• Works with textures but not whole sounds (EG a car alarm or a drill)

Accusonus Room Tone Match

Previously available as part of Accusonus’s ERA 5 bundle, Room Tone Match is no longer officially available, since the company was acquired and ceased sales of all its plugins. Room Tone Match was an AudioSuite-only plugin that was useful only for Pro Tools users.

However, unofficially, you can still get the ERA 5 bundle, as installers have been made publicly available by some Accusonus fans, and all previously registered license keys continue to work (and some can be found online). To find out more about the plugin, the Web Archive’s Wayback Machine should contain stored information from the site from 30th September 2020 shortly after ERA 5’s release.

With the ERA 5 & 6 bundles no longer available for sale, it doesn’t seem like an ethical problem to get Room Tone Match this way, although you could put yourself at risk of malware, depending where you download it from. For that reason, we don’t have a link we can responsibly point you to, and we must tell you to act with caution if you choose to proceed.

Plugin Pros

• Simple solution for matching room tone

Plugin Cons

• Hard to get (proceed with caution)
• Won’t receive updates
• Predates Apple Silicon
• AudioSuite format only (no VST, AU)

Undertone Lite

The perfect alternative to the full Undertone 2, Undertone Lite offers a streamlined experience without all the features, for a smaller cost.

The full Undertone 2 offers Multi mode, where you can load in up to 10 samples and trigger their playback and selection using probabilities over time. Multi mode on the right can be run in parallel and blended with the Single mode on the left, and Undertone Lite practically gives you Single Mode on its own.

Plugin Pros

• Generates room tone for ambience replacement from loaded sample
• AudioSuite support to render room tone

Plugin Cons

• Only loads one sample, no probability weightings
• No AI assistant to automatically select noise from a long sample
• No stereo or surround features

How About a Convolution Plugin?

Technically, dropping a sample of your room tone into a convolution processor is one way to create more room tone. Undertone and Undertone Lite use convolution as one component of their process, but alongside granular resynthesis. Some sources better suit granular, and some sound better with convolution. The fusion of these two methods mean you get the best of both worlds in Undertone 2 and Undertone Lite.

Workable convolution plugins for this method include kiloHearts Convolver, which costs $39 as standard, and AudioThing Fog Convolver, which costs $69 in general.

Method Pros

• Gives good results on many static types of room tone
• Convolution plugins are also useful for reverb, and you may own one already

Method Cons

• Hard to work out at first

Absentia DX

Absentia DX s a tool built to remove noise from voice recordings, but it also has an Air Tone option that generates “room tone generated from nearby regions”. Besides generating ‘Air Tone’ (Room Tone), the plugin can even transcribe audio speech to text, but it’s quite complicated to get up and running straight away with this whole package.

Absentia DX is priced yearly, with your first year costing three times more than in subsequent, ongoing years. There’s a two-day trial to give it a test drive.

Plugin Pros

• Can generate air tone from an imported sample as well as perform other functions

Plugin Cons

• Subscription pricing won’t be preferred by everyone

More on Undertone 2

Our software makes it easy to generate room tone and ambience from either dedicated room tone files or recorded dialogue with ambience behind it. Perfect for ADR and other dialogue editing duties, Undertone can save audio editors time and frustration in post production.

Take a closer look at Undertone here.