How To Add Music In iMovie On a Mac

You can add music to your iMovie project from a file, from iMovie itself, or your Music library. Once in iMovie, you can adjust it, fade, apply effects and more. But be careful when adding music to make sure you take into account copyright.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to add music to your projects in iMovie.
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So when you are building a project in iMovie you may decide that you want to add some background music to it. Well this can be a little tricky. Where do you get the music from? Once you add it how can you adjust it and what are the technical and legal challenges having music in your iMovie project.
First let's look at how you get some music into your iMovie project. I've got a simple project here. Just some clips that I placed in and let's say I want to add some background music to them. One place I can get these from is by using a file. So I've got a file here, just sitting on the Desktop, and I can drag and drop that into the project. I don't have to import it in first or do anything special. I could drag right from the Finder into the project. Right into the Timeline. If I drag it in here and I leave it there you could see how it attaches to a clip. So in this case this is now attached to the clip and the music starts right at that point in the clip. I can drag it to readjust where it starts. I can drag it to another clip as well. But if I drag the clip notice that the music comes along with it. It's attached to that point. 
Now another place that you could drag music to is here at the bottom. See that little musical note. You can drag right from the Finder into that area or I can drag this down there and now this is in a special track that is just meant for background music. Once it is in there I can still adjust its starting point, like that. I can just move it along. If I wanted to I could add another clip here. Also if the clip is attached to a track I could add more. I'm going to use the same one here and I could attach a second clip and you could see I've got two here. So maybe one is music. Maybe this is a sound effect or spoken audio. 
That's, of course, assuming you have a piece of music ready. It's an audio file sitting on your hard drive and you want to bring it in. What if you don't have a piece of music. Well, iMovie comes with some music and so does other Apple software. If you go, in iMovie, to Audio & Video here and you click on Sound Effects you can look through a list of sound effects. Some of these are actually music. So you can go here and see what you have. You can see I have stuff from Final Cut. I've got some stuff from older versions of iMovie and Sound Effects and all of that. You can select any of these and see what is music. You can preview it right here. You can take it and simply drag it in just the same way you dragged a file from the Finder. You can put it here or you can drag it down to the bottom there. 
Another place you can get music from is by clicking here. This shows you your Music Library. So if we go to the Music App you can see this is what I have in my Library there. Now it includes music that is in my Library. So stuff that I've ripped from CD's or stuff that I've purchased somehow or created myself as files and brought them into the Music App and are now in my Music Library. It will not include Apple Music streaming songs. It also won't include songs that if you're using Apple Music or iTunes Match they are being streamed even though you ripped them from CD's or got them some other way unless you download them. So you won't see them here. But say this was a song that was part of iTunes Match or Apple Music's iCloud Music feature you would see a little download button meaning it's not local. But if I downloaded it using that down arrow it will be local and then it would appear here. So if you're missing songs it is either they are Apple Music or they are part of the iCloud Music Streaming part of Apple Music even though you brought them in.
Now most of the stuff you have here probably has copyright issues and I'll talk about that later. But assuming maybe it doesn't. Maybe it is a track you recorded yourself. You could drag and drop into the timeline or into the background music track at the bottom. 
Now let's talk about adjusting the music now that you have it in your project. So whether it is here at the bottom or whether it's attached to a clip it's all the same. You could select this and then you have some things you can do right here. Click on that and now you can adjust the volume. Click on this you could adjust the Equalizer and you can also reduce background noise although you shouldn't have that in any music. Click here and you can adjust the speed. So maybe if you want to slow the music a bit or you want to speed it up maybe to fit along with your video or maybe the tempo is just too fast for the mood you can do that here and you could also preserve pitch as well. You could always go to Custom right here and change the percentage there to make it match something more exactly. Click here and you can go to Audio Effect and you can add a Audio Effect for the music there. Usually you use that for voice or other things but it could create a neat mood by applying an Audio Effect to music. 
Now another way to adjust volume is to go down here and you see this line? Drag that up or down and you can see how it adjusts the volume there. At the top was well. So you can adjust the entire thing. You can also Fade In by dragging this dot here over to the right and you can see now it's going to fade in the music. You can do the same thing on the back here. Fade Out. You can also go to any point in the music there, hold the Option Key down and click. You can see it creates a dot. You can create a series of dots. Then you can drag this line and notice how it only drags the space between the dots. So this would lower the volume. Keep it at that low volume there and then raise it back up again. So you can do all sorts of things with the volume to have it get quieter or louder during different parts of your video. You can even click in here and then go to Modify and Split Clip. Split the clip and then move this part here. So I have a stop the music there. Maybe have it fade out a bit and then start it up again here and fade in a bit if you want or even rearrange sections or reuse sections of music. This works here at the bottom background music track but it also works if you would bring this up and attach it to clips. So you have tons of things that you could do in iMovie to adjust the music and make it fit your video. 
Also note that if you want to trim the end of any music you can just grab the right side here and just trim it like that. You can also trim from the beginning. So there's a lot you can do. 
Now if you don't want to use music that's inside iMovie already and you haven't created any of your own music where do you get music from? Well, the main place people go is to go online and they search for Royalty Free Music. Royalty Free means you're allowed to use the music in your videos without having to pay the copyright holder each time the video is viewed. If you search for Royalty Free Music you're going to come up with tons of sites, hundreds, thousands of sites that have Royalty Free Music or at least claim to. There are some free ones and there are a lot of pay ones. Most are pay. Now even if you pay, but especially if it is free, a lot of times it is not really Royalty Free. It says it is. It says you've got the rights to use it. But when you actually publish it, say to YouTube, you may find out you have a copyright strike or somebody is hitting you up for money. That's because the site may have lied to you. Just because it says it is Royalty Free doesn't guarantee it in some sort of way. There are plenty of people that complain about getting so-called Royalty Free Music from somewhere and then finding they still have trouble with it. In other cases you may actually have purchased the rights to use the music in the video but that doesn't stop somebody else from saying that you haven't. There's all sorts of tricks and scams and things out there. People claiming that you don't have the right to use the music even if you do or claiming you do have the right to use the music and then it turns out you don't. It's a minefield and a big headache! Which is why you rarely ever find music in any of my videos. I just don't want to deal with it. 
Now one way to get background music in your videos that you know nobody else has and it is not subject to copyright is to create your own. It's easier than you think. If you go into GarageBand, the free App from Apple, you can just create an empty project like this. Go to Loops and then add various different loops. I can go to instruments here. Go to Drums. I'll add a drum and then I will loop it a bunch of times and then I'll go and maybe add electric piano and I'll take that and put that in here. Loop that a bunch of times. Then maybe some base and I'll take that and put that in. Loop that a bunch of times. I'm just going to get some random music that usually ends up sounding pretty decent especially if it is played at low volume. (music playing) Then you just go to Share, Export Song to Disc, and then create a file that you can then drag and drop in and use in your project. Although there's no guarantee. Even a completely original song that you wrote, composed, and played could still be hit with a copyright strike. That's the kind of problems that we deal with when using music online. 
If you are thinking of using a real song recorded by an artist in your videos and you think, well that's okay because I'm not making any money off of it. It's nonprofit, non-commercial. That doesn't absolve you of copyright infringement. You don't have to make money off of your video to infringe on copyright. As a matter of fact even just using, in a video where you only show some friends and you don't upload it anywhere, that's still technically copyright infringement. So be aware of that. But if you bought music from a reputable Royalty Free Music site, you've created your own, or you used one of Apple's jingles that it has included with iMovie you should be okay. Now you know the basics of how to get into iMovie, adjust it, and play around with the music to have it fit your video. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
How To Add Music In iMovie On a Mac

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