Adding Music to your video

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how easy it is to download, then add music tracks to your videos. The source of this music is free, all you have to do is give the composer credit, which is a small price to pay considering the variety and quality of music available to use.

Here we are in Power Director with a video I’ve made on how to make home made pizza. From a number of video clips I’ve made this video which is quite long, about 19 minutes which, when producing in the highest camera quality is about as long as you want to go – perhaps too long as Power Director (at least the earlier versions) had a processing limit of 4 gig.

As you can see the video, text and audio dialogue has been made so now we want to find suitable music and add it to the mix.

I forget the actual name of the website to download music tracks but I do remember the composer’s name so we’ll go into google and search from there.

The composers’ name is Kevin Macleod so if we type in his name hopefully we’ll be able to find his website. And yes here it is. Incompetech.

So the first thing to do is click on the “Royalty Free music” tab. This opens up a new page where you can see the vastness and diversity of the music available for download. From here it’s just a matter of searching through all the different categories to find music appropriate for the project at hand, either by genre or feel.

Once you have found a category, the site is well set up with individual tracks listed and the opportunity to listen to each track before deciding to download or not. Just hit the play button to listen.

If you want to download the track, just click on the download link. Before that though it’s necessary to first create a folder called “music” or the like on your computer where you can download chosen tracks to.

Then it’s just a matter of working your way down the list and through the different categories downloading those tracks you want to use.

This is a very simple procedure and quick, enabling you to download a host of different  high quality music in a very short time.

Then, once you have downloaded what you need it’s just a matter of navigating to the music folder and importing the music tracks into Power Director. And this procedure is exactly the same as importing video clips into Power Director’s media room. Click on the yellow “import media” tab at the top of the screen and either import individual tracks or import the whole folder.

If you have a bunch of clips, as you will over time, power director has the facility to let you listen to tracks before you actually import them, in case you forget (as you will) what individual tracks sound like. To lesson the chance of forgetting what tracks are what, it might pay to appropriately rename tracks as you download them to your music folder.

In this example we’ll download four different types of music tracks and incorporate them into our video.

Ok we’re missing one track so I’ll import one more track.

As you can see, music files are quite distinguishable from video files in the media room, and like video clips it’s just a matter of dragging the music files down into the music time line.

From the music track you can then edit, meaning cut pieces out, or lower or raise the volume of the music as you see fit.

Now generally with music, especially if it’s high quality, the default volume setting is probably going to be a bit high if you have an audio narration. You don’t want the narration being drowned out by the music so it may be necessary to lower the music to a suitable background volume level.

We can quickly adjust the volume level by first clicking on the track, then clicking on the audio mixing room treble clef icon on the left hand side of the screen. Then just drag the volume level down to a suitable level. Alternatively it might be necessary to raise the volume level in some cases and you can do this by raising the volume level here as well.

Once you have the right volume level go through the other music tracks, by clicking on them and lower the volume to the same level. Then test each music track to make sure of overall consistency.

You can fade in or fade out the music by setting the blue line where you want the fade in or fade out to occur and click the fade in or fade out button at the bottom of the volume control.

As mentioned previously this music is free but it’s only fair that you give the composer credit and the easiest way to do this is at the end of the video with something like “music by” (in this case Kevin Macleod). So with our text editor we give credit where credit is due.

And that is it. We now have a high quality music track to accompany and enhance our video which is free and easy to insert.

If you’re importing music from another source then the procedure is exactly the same.

Download and save the music into a music folder, import the tracks into your media room then drag and drop into the music time line.

Lower or raise the volume level, add fade ins or fade outs if necessary, and you’re done.

The video is now ready for producing.