You shot great footage at a party, but the audio is blown out with bass distortion. You recorded a product demo in a noisy cafe. You captured a beautiful drone shot, but the propeller buzz drowns out everything. The video is perfect. The audio is not.
Replacing the audio with music transforms the content from unusable to shareable. Social media content with clean music outperforms content with bad audio consistently, because viewers associate audio quality with overall production value.
The two-step process
Step 1: Remove the existing audio. Use the MediaBrew mute tool to strip the audio track from your video. This gives you a clean video-only file with no audio data at all.
Step 2: Add new audio. Use the MediaBrew add audio tool to combine the muted video with your chosen music file (MP3, AAC, WAV, or any common format). The tool merges the video and audio into a single output file.
This two-step approach is cleaner than trying to "replace" audio in one step because it gives you full control: you can review the muted video before deciding what audio to pair with it.
Choosing the right music
For social media, the music you add should match the mood and pacing of the video:
- Upbeat, energetic footage (sports, action, celebrations): Uptempo tracks with strong rhythm
- Product shots and demos: Clean, minimal instrumental music
- Nature and travel footage: Ambient, atmospheric tracks
- Cooking and lifestyle: Lo-fi beats, acoustic guitar, light jazz
- Dramatic or cinematic footage: Orchestral or electronic cinematic music
Where to find free-to-use music
Using copyrighted music on social media will get your content muted or removed. Several libraries offer royalty-free music:
- YouTube Audio Library (free, requires a YouTube account)
- Pixabay Music (free, Creative Commons licenses)
- Free Music Archive (free, various licenses)
- Uppbeat (free tier with attribution)
- Artlist and Epidemic Sound (paid subscriptions, no attribution needed)
Always check the license terms. "Royalty-free" means you pay once (or zero for free tracks) and can use it without per-play royalties. It does not mean you can use any music without permission.
Audio length vs. video length
If your music track is longer than your video, the output will be truncated to the video length. The music simply stops when the video ends. This is usually fine for social media.
If your music track is shorter than your video, the behavior depends on the tool. Some tools loop the audio, some pad with silence, and some truncate the video to match the audio. MediaBrew truncates the output to the shorter of the two, so choose a music track that is at least as long as your video.
Audio volume balance
When adding music to a video that already has ambient sound (not fully muted), the relative volume between the original audio and the music matters. If the music is too loud, it drowns out speech. If too quiet, it does not add atmosphere.
Since you are fully muting the original audio first, this is not a concern. The music becomes the only audio track. If you want to keep some of the original audio (like ambient nature sounds) and layer music on top, you would need an audio mixer, which is beyond the scope of these tools. For that workflow, export both audio tracks separately and mix them in a tool like Audacity before combining with the video.
The two-step process in MediaBrew is straightforward: mute tool first (strips the audio track), then add audio tool (attaches the music file). Both steps run locally via FFmpeg WebAssembly and typically finish in under 30 seconds for clips under 5 minutes.