How to Add Music to a Video on Mac

The fastest way to add music to a video on Mac is to select Audio & Video above the iMovie browser, choose Music in the sidebar, and drag a track down to the music well. Here's the full path, how to use only the section you want, and the audio work worth doing before any of it.

Add music to a video on Mac with iMovie

With your movie open in the timeline, select Audio & Video above the browser. The sidebar offers Music, Apple TV and Sound Effects. Files from elsewhere work too. M4A, MP4, MP3, WAV and AIFF can be dragged from the Finder straight into the project.

Where you drop it changes what it is. The music well sits below the timeline, marked with a musical note icon; anything dropped there behaves as background music for the whole movie, positioned and trimmed independently of the shots above it. Drop a file under a particular clip instead and it attaches to that clip, moving with it. For a score under the entire piece, the well is what you want.

Songs are usually longer than the video, and you rarely want the opening bars. Select a range in the waveform at the top of the browser , it takes a yellow border when selected , then drag that range down rather than the whole track. That's how you start on the chorus instead of on twenty seconds of intro.

Setting the level, then checking it on the wrong speakers on purpose

The common failure isn't choosing the wrong song. It's a mix where the voice and the music occupy the same part of the frequency range and cancel each other out, so the words become effort to follow without ever being obviously inaudible.

Two things fix it, in order. First, the music level has to be set deliberately under the spoken sections rather than nudged down until it feels about right. The difference between "quieter" and "underneath" is the whole thing. Second, check the result on the speaker you expect people to use. A mix balanced on studio headphones frequently collapses on a laptop speaker, where there's much less low end to hide behind.

The order that decides how the mix turns out

Montaj doesn't add music. There's no track browser and no sound library in it, and that part of the job stays in iMovie or wherever you're getting the music from.

What it does is everything on the voice, before the music ever goes underneath: transcribing the speech on your device, cutting the dead air out of a rambling take, and cleaning up background noise. That sequencing is the actual advice hidden in this page. A voice track that's already tight and free of hiss gives the music somewhere to sit, while a noisy one competes with it at every frequency and no amount of level-setting rescues the result. Get that done first, and the job you came here for , add music to a video on Mac, in iMovie, under a voice that can be heard , takes five minutes instead of an evening.