YouTube’s New AI Music Assistant Creates Custom Tracks For Your Long-Form Videos
Sign in to your Android Police account
Summary
- YouTube is launching “Music Assistant,” an AI tool within Creator Music (currently for some US creators) that generates custom, royalty-free instrumental background music for longer videos based on user prompts.
- Building on the Dream Tracks experiment, this new feature offers granular control over the generated music’s style, instruments, and mood, providing an alternative to often-used CC0 tracks.
- YouTube is also testing a feature to automatically synchronize imported content in Shorts with chosen audio, aiming to simplify the editing process for short-form video creators.
Roughly one year after YouTube started experimenting with letting users generate music using the AI-powered Dream Tracks feature, the streaming giant is now further building upon the feature with ‘Music Assistant.’
While Dream Tracks primarily focused on generating short music clips, the new AI Music Assistant feature is designed to generate background music for long-form YouTube videos, and it is rolling out to some US-based creators now.
Related
Announced by the streaming giant in a new Creator Insider YouTube video (via TechCrunch), the feature is only available to those that have access to Creator Music (Beta) YouTube Studio. It allows users to generate instrumental background tracks using simple AI prompts, where users can specify the type of music they’re looking for, instruments, mood, the type of video the music is for, and more — essentially unlocking granular control over what the AI generates.
As seen in the screenshots below, users can also use pre-made prompts like “Calm and peaceful music with acoustic guitar and flowing piano,” or “Give me happy mood songs with good beats, or songs I can dance to.”
Once generated, the tool throws out several options to choose from, all of which are completely free-to-use, and come without any copyright hassle. Creators can then download the generated tracks, add them and publish their video, finally offering relief to our ears which have grown used to listening to Creative Commons Zero (CC0) background tracks.
Shorts creators, there’s something for y’all too
In addition to the AI Music Assistant, YouTube is also testing out a feature that automatically syncs your short content with the music you choose to add to it. Explained in the same Creator Insider video, YouTube will let a small group of creators test out the new experimental feature, which essentially simplifies the editing process for creators that want to align music clips with their content’s rhythm.
“We’re experimenting with the ability for creators to automatically match content they’ve imported into shorts with the audio they choose,” suggests the Creator Insider video, adding that “when you select multiple photos and video clips from your phone’s gallery, you’ll now have the option to automatically create a short video synced to music — just choose the media, pick a song, and it will arrange your clips to match the beat. “
YouTube alluded that it might expand the feature widely at a later date.
