Quickly add a music track to a video with Adobe Stock audio in Premiere Pro

In Adobe Premiere Pro, select the Audio Workspace preset, or choose Workspace > Essential Sound to reveal the all new Essential Sound panel with Adobe Stock audio built right in. Make sure you click Browse at the top of the panel so you can explore the extensive library.

You’ll notice that the Browse tab in the  Essential Sound panel has a search bar, as well as three options to help limit your results: Mood, Genre, and Filters.

Use the search bar to search for keywords. You can also limit your results by Mood, Genre, Tempo, Vocals, etc. 

In our example, we’re looking for background music to support a short brand video we’re editing for an adventure travel company. It’s about a surf camp, so we’ll search for the key words, “beach” and add the filter genre by “pop.”

Adobe Premiere Pro’s powerful Timeline Sync lets you preview any Adobe Stock audio cue, in perfect time with your video - even before you import the asset to your project!

Note that there’s a checked box at the bottom of the Essential Sound Panel next to Timeline Sync.

With that enabled, park your timeline’s playhead anywhere in your timeline where you anticipate starting the music cue. In our case, we’ll be playing from the first frame so we’ll start there. Next identify a music cue in your search results you’d like to preview and click the play button next to the cue name.

When you decide to preview a different track, all you have to do is click the play button next to the new track name. The playhead in your timeline will jump back to your initial starting point for a fresh preview.

Note that the outpoint in your timeline is dictated by the duration of the music cue you are previewing and will update with each new cue you play.

Once you find a track that you want to cut into your timeline, simply drag and drop it from the Essential Sound panel, directly into your timeline. You could also drag and drop it into a bin in your project, or right click the track and select “Add to project” if you prefer.

Note that this temp version of the Adobe Stock audio track is an m4a with no audio watermarks to interrupt the experience of your edit. You can export these versions, watermark free, to share privately with clients and collaborators. 

When you license a track for inclusion in your final edit, Adobe Premiere Pro will seamlessly replace the m4a version with a high quality wav file.

Now that you’ve got the Adobe Stock audio track in position, use the blade tool to trim the end to match the duration of your edit.

For this basic tutorial, we’ll add a fade in at the head of the video and a fade out transition at the tail to smooth the edit.

For now, right click on the head of the audio track and choose “Apply default transition.” Do the same for the tail of the track. To finesse the edit a bit, you may choose to extend the audio just past the video fade out.

You can audition as many tracks as you like by bringing them into your timeline. And you can export your videos with non-watermarked audio to send to clients for review. 

Once you’ve settled on the track that you’d like to lock with, you can license the track right from your timeline.

Simply right click on the Adobe Stock audio track you’d like to license, and click License… in the pop-up menu. You’ll need to have credits in your account, which you can pre-purchase at www.stock.adobe.com.

Immediately after you license the track, in the background, Adobe Premiere Pro will seamlessly replace all instances of the m4a with a high quality wav file that’s ready for export and broadcast.

Export your video with an Adobe Premiere Pro preset.

We’re using a 1080p HD Vimeo preset that outputs a video we can use anywhere on the web.

You’ve just added music to your video using Adobe Stock’s integrated music search feature in Adobe Premiere Pro.