We’ve already looked at choosing your screencasting software and editing the screencast in this screencast tutorial series, now let’s look at adding music.  Later we’ll look at exporting the finished video, embedding the screencast in your site and spreading it further afield into sites like YouTube and Vimeo.  We’ll also cover narration recording and how to add extra polish.

Background music helps to give pace to your video – you can choose a fun and fast track for a homepage intro screencast and soothing, gentle music during longer tutorials.  We use a backing track in this introduction to the AdblockPlus Firefox extension, it is a part of the reason we’ve got over 60 five-star ratings.  It keeps the screencast moving along at a nice pace and makes it stand out above the other AdblockPlus videos that are in YouTube:

Typically you buy a track (cost: $10USD – $50USD) and add it to your screencast using a screencast editor (e.g. CamTasia or ScreenFlow).  Generally we alter the volume envelope of the track before we add it to the screencast so it is louder at first, quiet during narration and fades out at the end.

Sites we’ve used for background music include LoopSound and StockMusic.net.  Browse through their catalogues and preview the tracks.  When you purchase a track generally you get a few days to download the .wav and/or .mp3 and then you have to keep it locally (the sites don’t store your purchase for long).

If your narration is problematic (e.g. you have background noise, coughs, street-noise, breathing) then you will find that a backing music track is a cheap fix.  It won’t remove the problems but it will hide them.

Note that we always suggest fixing your source recording.  Here at ProCasts we always record the voice-over separately, remove background noise, remove any artefacts and apply range compression and normalisation as a matter of course.  We’d never release a problematic audio track and you shouldn’t either!

Audacity is a great audio editor.  You can open the volume envelope tool to change the volume throughout the track, first cut the music to the precise length of your screencast and then start loud, fade down for narration, then fade out at the end.

This process is fiddly and will take multiple attempts but the results are well worth it!

For good examples of possible end results see our screencast examples page and watch the LiveDrive, Adblock Plus and BrandWatch examples.

An alternate approach to manually changing the volume on a music track is to use side-chaining:

Side-chaining uses the signal level of another input or an equalized version of the original input to control the compression level of the original signal.

The technique is known as ducking, when you speak your voice’s presence is used to lower the volume of the music track.  This means that the music track’s volume will raise and lower (which might sound odd in places) but the process is going to be simpler than manually adjusting the volume levels.  Thanks to Gasto for the tip.

What next?  Well, you’ll want to export your screencast in the right format for the widest possible distribution.

Do you want more of your visitors to use your software? We make professional screencasts.  Get in Contact and we’ll help you convert more visitors into users, sell more of your software and reduce your support costs.

Become a better screencaster – read The Screencasting Handbook.  We’re distilling 4 years of experience into our book, this blog series you’re reading was the first inspiration that we should write everything we know into a book to make you a better screencaster.

The Screencast Tutorial Part 4 – Adding music to become more professional by ProCasts' Blog about Professional Screencast Production, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

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