A quick guide to adding music to podfics in Audacity

by CrackleKiro (ChaosKiro)

Summary:

Some tips and tricks for adding music to podfics. With screenshots of Audacity to make it easy to follow.
Chapter two is a list of websites which share free-to-use music.

Notes:

This is a mix between general tips to keep in mind when adding music, and some tools I wish I had known about when I first started adding music to podfics. I have tried to keep it fairly concise and simple. This is but one way to do it and I'm sure there are many ways to further sophisticate the process, but this aims to give some good tools to begin with.
Thank you to Jocunda Sykes for input on what to include <3

Chapter 1: How to add music in Audacity

Step one is finding your music and downloading it as mp3. In chapter 2 I've added a bunch of resources for finding royalty-free music. For downloading from youtube I recommend cobalt.tools since they don’t take your data and work in the browser, but there are many possibilities.

Next step is importing into Audacity. This you do by clicking File > Import > Audio... as seen below.

When the music is imported, it appears in a new track. It might look something like this:

I like playing around with the volume of the music track out to the left to balance the levels. There’s something with how music is compressed that can make it hard to go by volume numbers.

A word of advice: err on the side of the music being too low, it being louder than the speech is generally worse than it being quieter.

Up top I’ve marked the envelope tool which I use for fading music in and out. With that you can adjust the volume up and down of sections of the track just by creating points along it and dragging them closer or father from the middle as seen in the next screenshot. It will create transitions between the points by itself. One thing to note is that if you pinch off the sound completely I find that it fades out way too quickly, so I like to add a second point at not quite zero, close to the zero point for a gentler fade, as you can see rightmost in the music track. Audacity also has fade-in and fade-out features which can be used, though I personally like the flexibility of the envelope tool.

A final thing to consider is where to place your music and how much you want to add. A lot of this comes down to personal taste, but no matter where it's added it's good to keep in mind how it merges with the narration: if it is parallel to the narration it's important it isn't too loud and if it comes after or before narrations leaving a too large gap between the two can create a weird vacuum of sound.

Last, but not least: make it your own! Some people like a quick fade-out others really stretch it out, add small pieces during the fic if you want or just do one final bite, add an instrumental cover of a song instead of the original. There’s as many ways to do this as there are podfics with music and the best way to find out how you like it is to experiment and listen to others who have done it their own way.

Notes:

Do you have a trick that is not mention here? Share it in the comments! I am still learning and then the other people looking at this can see it too.
Questions and comments are very welcome.

Chapter 2: Websites with free-to-use music

Here are some websites which share free-to-use music, these are mainly taken from recommendations by other podficcers so I don't have personal experience with many of them. Nevertheless they might be a good place to start if you don't want to contemplate your own relationship with copyright-law.

blue dot sessions provide acoustic music under a blanket license, requiring only that you attribute the music to the artist. It has a nice search function where you among other things can filter by instruments, mood and energy.

Audio library on youtube has a wide variety of free-to-use music, mostly sorted into playlists by artist. This one also requires crediting the artist.

chosic has a bunch of royalty-free music sorted into categories based on fx genre or mood. Here some pieces require attribution and some do not.

Notes:

If any links are dead or you have more information to give on these resources don't hesitate to comment! I would also love to hear of other databases for free-to-use music so that I can add to this list.