How to Add Music to a Video for TikTok

The fastest way to add music to a video for TikTok is to use Add Sound in the app, trim the track to your clip, and set its level deliberately against the voice. Here's the full sequence, and the account-type detail that changes which songs you'll even see.

Add music to a video for TikTok from the app's own library

Sound on TikTok comes from TikTok. That's not a limitation to route around, it's how attribution and discovery work on the platform.

Which library you see depends on your account. TikTok documents the difference plainly: with a Business account, "when you start a new video and click on Add Sound, you will only see sounds from the Commercial Music Library." The Commercial Music Library is described as "a global music library of 1 million songs" for businesses. On a personal account you see all sounds, and TikTok's instruction for reaching the commercial ones is to tap the Sounds button and select Commercial Sounds from the dropdown.

If you've ever switched to a Business account and found a track missing, that's the reason.

Once the track is chosen, TikTok's editing tools let you cut, trim and set the duration for sounds, and add sound effects, so the music can start on a beat and stop on the last word instead of running to the end regardless.

Getting the voice to survive underneath

The failure most people blame on the song isn't the song. Voice and music occupy overlapping frequency ranges, and when both sit at full level they mask each other. The music sounds thin and the words become approximate.

Two fixes, in order. Reduce the music under the spoken sections as a deliberate level decision rather than a nudge. And check the result on a phone speaker rather than headphones, because a mix balanced on headphones routinely collapses on the hardware most people will actually hear it through.

Do the voice work first

Montaj doesn't add music. There's no track library in it, and the song still comes from TikTok's own Add Sound. What it takes care of is everything on the voice, automatically and before the music ever goes on: it transcribes the audio on your device, generates word-by-word subtitles from it, removes the silences in one tap, and runs an on-device denoiser over the voice track. A clean, tight voice is dramatically easier to mix a track under than a raw one — which is why adding music to a video for TikTok should be the last thing you do, not the first.