Transportation by BOOM Library Review

In our review, we are taking a look at Transportation by BOOM Library. Transportation is a public and ambient city library released in early 2018. When you do sound editing and design for an advertisement, short, trailer or feature you are typical in need for sounds that sit in the background to engage the audience more.

Transportation includes those kinds of characters that provides a shell where an audience is embedded into the scene through noises and sounds that we all hear in our daily experiences. BOOM Library did send a review copy with no strings attached.

Installation

After purchase, you download the files in an archive which you want to unpack locally on your hard disk. If you use database tools like SoundMiner or Basehead, add the data from Transportation, and you are ready to go.

Sound

Transportation includes vehicles sounds. You get cars driving on different surfaces, trucks riding around in the audio space, highway/autobahn noises. Trains riding to their destinations, sounds from inside a train, the required freight train sounds, boats, ventilation hums, helicopter & Jet sounds, and a few Formula 1 race cars as a bonus.

If you are a sound designer, you should already know if this library includes what you have been looking for years. If your part of the reader community that is composing music, the fit for this background sounds will be restricted in a musical context. As a sound editor or sound designer, you are probably looking to purchase this library right away.

In Transportation, you find high-quality sounds of engines and moving from trains, road vehicles, boats, planes, and even some F1 race cars. The producing company BOOM Library did record those high-quality vehicle ambiances where it did make sense one by one in remote places. That way a single vehicle is a captured sound without a different vehicle or dominant sound bleeding into the recording.

BOOM Library Transportation includes several hundreds of WAV (24bit – 48kHz ) files which you can import into various DAWs, video editing tools or audio management tools. Overall the recordings are very usable and can sit very quickly in the background of your tracks the next time you do work on a cinematic, trailer, advertisements or corporate project.

To give you an idea of the complete package the included Sounds have these attached keywords:
TRANSPORTATION, CAR, SPEED, ROAD, FAST, PICKUP TRUCK, DIESEL TRUCK, STOPS, HIGHWAY, AMBIENCE, LOOP, TRAFFIC, TRAIN, RAIL, ENGINE, PASSENGER TRAIN, INTERIOR, TRAVELLING, UNDERGROUND, LOCOMOTIVE, HORN BLASTS, ECHOES, FREIGHT TRAIN, BELL, HAULING, RUMBLES, MOUNTAINSIDE, THUNDERING, METAL STRAINS, PADDLE STROKES, WATER, IDLE, RIVER, BOAT, CRUISING, PROPELLER, UNDERWATER, MOTORBOAT, SHIP, VENTILATION, WAVE SLAPS, DECK, HELICOPTER, PLANE, JET, AIRPORT, TAKE OFF, FORMULA 1, RACE, SPEEDWAY (Complete list in detail here)

On a project, you will combine Transportation sounds with additional ones from different libraries. There is a perfect fit with Urban & Suburban by BOOM Library available as well which we also reviewed.

User interface & Usability

With the included WAV files there is no UI. Most important when it comes to usability is the quality of the include keywords and meta-data. When you use an administration tool like SoundMiner or BaseHead to manage the sound files, you will find that the included meta-data and well-defined keywords are essential to finding the correct sound. Searching for a keyword in your database of several thousand sounds files that go beyond this library is critical to be able to find the needed sounds. While Transportation does not include more than four hundred sound, it will be added to your pool of sounds, which overall will be in the ten of thousands after some time.

Rating:  Five out of five stars

Transportation is one of the leading products offering transparent vehicle recordings for a sound editor and sound designer. Transportation is unique in this market and has been carefully recorded.

The recordings are ready to be used in the background and suit in a non-intrusiveness way in any picture where vehicles play a remote or central role. There are also many close recordings included if you need to make the vehicle more dominant in a scene. If the talent is in a car during a scene, you need these kinds of sounds. Overall the sounds are very believable and come with a naturalistic quality. The high value from this library for a sound editor and sound designer originate from the quality of the recordings.