How to Add Music to a Video for YouTube

To add music to a video for YouTube that's already uploaded, open it in Studio, choose Editor, then Audio. You can search the library, preview a track and place it without re-uploading anything.

Add music to a video for YouTube from the Audio Library

The path is Content → the video → Editor → Audio. Search filters narrow the library down; Play previews a track and Add places it on the video. Drag the track, or its edges, to set where the music starts and stops, then Save.

Two limits apply to everything in the Studio Editor: it only works on videos shorter than six hours, and a video with over 100,000 views may not accept saved changes at all. Both are worth checking before you spend twenty minutes choosing a track.

Music on Shorts: two rules that surprise people

On a Short recorded in the app, YouTube's tools may let you add up to 90 seconds of music to a three-minute Short, depending on the song. So the music budget and the video budget aren't the same number.

The second rule is sharper. If you built the Short by remixing your own long-form video , Remix → Edit into a Short , then you cannot use music or other sounds from the Audio Library on it. People discover this after cutting the perfect sixty seconds, which is exactly the wrong moment.

Working the voice, not the music

Montaj doesn't add music. There's no track picker in it, no library to browse, and nothing that behaves like one.

What it handles is the other audio problem. The one under the music. It transcribes the voice on your device, cleans up background noise with an on-device model tuned for speech, and cuts the dead air out in one tap. Every part of that runs locally; the audio isn't uploaded anywhere to be processed. A clean, tight voice track is far easier to sit music under than a noisy one, so it's worth doing before you add music to a video for YouTube rather than after.