I wanted to write about this feature back when I wrote about YouTube's "Video Annotations" .  But I couldn't get it to work and I thought at the time that it was a US-only feature.   But it has now appeared and I've discovered that it is a great feature for people wanting to put music on their uploaded YouTube videos. OK, you're not going to get Shakira or Bono rocking to your wedding video but there is still a lot of great music clips available for you to add to your uploaded YouTube videos - and it's all free.

There's lots of reasons why you would want to add music to your videos. For a starter, music can add to the atmosphere of the piece. Imagine a bird soaring through the sky, a man and a woman kissing, Leo and Kate standing on the bow of the Titanic....or you've simply said something embarrassing about your relative's waist size and you want it cut out before they cut YOU out of their will.

Whatever the reason, you can now have the video soundtrack easily removed and have it replaced with a soaring uplifting melody, a funky pop song, a headbanging rock and roller or some relaxing classical tune.

So as usual, here's MakeUseOf to guide you through how to do it :

1. Decide which video you want to replace the audio for

add background music to video

Log into your YouTube account and go to your videos. Find the video you want to replace the audio for and in the options, you'll find a button called "AudioSwap". Click on that little baby right there.

2. Choose the music you want to use as a background

background music for video

This is harder than it sounds.There are literally LOTS to choose from - LOTS of songs and LOTS of artists in LOTS of genres. You really are spoilt for choice. Just skimming over the list, you can have Alicia Keys, Cranberries, Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. As I said, no Shakira shaking her hips or Bono with his sunglasses but you can't have everything you want in life.

If you want the song to end when your video ends, you can filter the songs down to "only show songs of similar length to my video".

So just scroll through them all, click what you want and you can preview each song before you finally make your selection. When you have made your selection, just click the "publish" button underneath your video and your video will be re-uploaded to YouTube along with the selected music. The previous soundtrack will be deleted permanently.

audioswap

As an intended example, I tried changing the soundtrack to my Rudy video which I used for my annotations article. I changed the soundtrack to a rock song called "Therapy" by "Finger Eleven". But it is taking quite a long time for YouTube to "process my request" to change the soundtrack and re-upload my video - in fact I am still waiting 24 hours later! So you need to bear that in mind when doing your own. Don't expect immediate results. Be prepared to wait in a long line.

Have you used YouTube AudioSwap? If so, what music did you use for your videos? What do you think about the whole service? Worth using? Have you had your videos done sooner than 24 hours?