How to Mute a Video for YouTube

To mute a video for YouTube, use Volume in the Shorts editor: click it, then drag the lever down. It's a level rather than a switch, which is more useful than it sounds. The original audio can sit quietly underneath something new instead of disappearing.

Mute a video for YouTube with the Volume lever

Volume lives alongside Sound, Text, Voiceover, Timeline and Filters in the Shorts editing tools. Dragging the lever all the way down silences the clip; dragging it partway leaves the original as a bed under whatever you add.

For a video that's already uploaded, the equivalent move is in the Studio Editor's Audio panel: search for a track, Play to preview it, Add to place it, drag the track or its edges into position, and Save. That's a replacement rather than a mute, which is usually what people actually want. A video with no audio at all reads in a feed as something that failed to load.

Muting is the wrong fix for a noisy recording

A lot of searches for a mute button are really about bad audio: wind, hum, a room echo, a conversation happening off camera. Muting solves that the way amputation solves a splinter.

If the voice is the content, the fix is to clean the voice. If the voice is irrelevant and the noise is the problem, then mute and replace. The distinction is worth five seconds of thought because the two paths lead to completely different edits.

Checking the audio actually came out right

Montaj has no mute switch. There's no one-tap silence toggle in it, and no per-clip volume lever.

What it does have is an export that checks its own work: before an export is declared finished, it verifies the duration, the dimensions and the audio, and decodes frames to confirm the file is real. On an edit where you've been deliberately removing or replacing sound, that audio check is the one that saves you. A file that exported silently by accident is exactly the kind of thing you discover after uploading, not before. It's a narrower guarantee than a mute button, but it addresses the failure that follows most attempts to mute a video for YouTube.