How to add music while filming
The simplest route is to pick a track before recording, so you film in rhythm from the start. The order is:
- Tap the create button in the middle of the bottom bar.
- At the top of the recording screen open the music section — usually a note icon labelled «Music» or «Sound».
- Find a track through search or pick from the collections — popular, by genre, trending.
- Trim the fragment: what you almost always need is not the start of the song but its most recognisable part.
- Record the video — the track plays in your headphones or speaker, helping you stay on beat.
Trimming is the most underrated step. The first second of a clip decides whether a viewer stays or swipes, so opening with a song's intro is rarely a good trade.
How to add music to a finished video
If the clip is already shot or comes from your gallery, sound is added at the editing stage. Once you pick the video the editor opens with the same music section: choose a track, trim the fragment and, if needed, shift it along the timeline so the accent in the song lands on the right moment on screen.
The balance is set there too: the volume of the original video audio and of the added track have separate sliders. For dance clips and transitions the original sound is usually pulled to zero, while for talking videos music stays a quiet background — around twenty percent, so speech remains clear.
Check the result on your phone speaker, not only in headphones: most viewers watch without them.
How to use your own music from the gallery
You cannot upload your own audio file straight into the Likee editor — the library is built from licensed tracks and adding external files is not supported. There is one workaround and it works: assemble the video together with its audio in any mobile video editor, export the finished file and upload that to Likee without adding music on top.
That is what people do when they need their own voice, original music or a track that is missing from the library. One warning: a commercial track baked into the video file may be caught by automated rights checks — then the clip gets muted or limited in distribution. Your own recording, royalty-free music and sounds from unrestricted libraries cause no such trouble.
Why a track cannot be found or disappeared
There are usually three reasons, and all of them are solvable:
- Regional licences. Some songs are not available in every country — they will not show up in search at all.
- The track was pulled. The rights holder removed the music and it disappears even from published clips, leaving them silent.
- An outdated app version. After an update the music section often starts working normally again.
A practical workaround is to look for alternative versions: remixes, sped-up and slowed edits, covers. They frequently stay in the library when the original is gone and sound almost the same to a viewer.
How to remove or replace the music
Before publishing it is simple: in the editor you drop the chosen track and pick another one, or pull its volume to zero and keep the original audio. A published video cannot be changed — the music is baked into the clip and the app offers no way to swap it afterwards.
So the working approach is to keep a draft, re-upload the clip with new audio and take the old post down. How to delete the previous version so your profile does not fill up with duplicates is described in how to delete a video on Likee. If you need to retrieve the clip in its original form first, see how to download a video from Likee.
How to pick a track that pushes a video into recommendations
The algorithm does not reward a specific song, but music affects what it does measure: watch time. A recognisable sound in the first second holds the viewer, and through the track itself people move into the collection of clips using the same music — an extra stream of views. Hence the practical rules: take a sound that is on the rise rather than one that peaked a month ago, and put the song's accent on a cut.
Music does not decide everything, though: hashtags and publishing time matter too. Those are covered in our guides on hashtags on Likee and getting into recommendations. And so a good clip does not stall on its first test, you can lift the starting activity with Likee views and likes — by a link to the video, with no account password.