Add music to a video

Two lanes for sound

The Music lane is for a song or a background track; the Voice lane is for narration or a second sound. Both play together with the clips' own sound, so a video can have music, a voice-over and the sound of the room at the same time. To move a sound to the other lane, click it and use Track on the right. A song you place from the media list starts at the playhead, so put the playhead where the music should begin first.

Any sound file FFmpeg reads goes in: MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, FLAC, OGG, Opus, WMA and AIFF among them. To use the soundtrack of another video, first turn it into a sound file (video to MP3 shows how), then add that file. For a voice-over, record it with Record your voice in the Audio Editor and drop the WAV on the Voice lane.

Getting the levels right

The most common mistake is music that drowns out speech. Some starting points, to adjust by ear:

Listen on the kind of speakers or headphones your viewers will use. Each sound can go up to 200% if it was recorded quietly, and the mix passes through a limiter, so the loudest moments do not clip. For a voice recorded in a noisy room, click it and switch on Reduce background noise or Even out loudness under Clean up.

Fitting the song to the video

The video is as long as its clips. A song that runs longer is cut off where the video ends, and the timeline marks the part after the end, which is not exported. Rather than let it stop mid-note:

• Drag the song's end in to a natural pause near the end of the video, and give it a Fade Out of 2 or 3 seconds.
• Skip a long intro by dragging the song's start in, so the part you like begins with the video.
• A song too short for the video can be repeated: click it and press Ctrl D, and the copy follows straight after. A short fade on each side of the join smooths it.

Several songs can follow one another on the Music lane for a longer video; let each one fade out as the next fades in. To cut a song to length before you bring it in, the MP3 cutter in the Audio Editor does it with the same moves.

Music you may use

Octoolo puts any song you have under your video, but where the video goes next has rules of its own. Sites such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram check uploads for copyrighted music, and may mute a video, block it or put ads on it for the rights holder.

For anything public, use music you made, music you have a license for, or tracks from a library meant for videos, such as the Audio Library in YouTube Studio, and keep a note of the license with your project. The same goes for sound effects. A video with the original sound and no music at all is never a problem.

Under speech, instrumental tracks are easier to work with than songs with lyrics, which compete with the voice for attention.