YouTubers Could Soon Add Multiple Audio Tracks to Videos

But Live Auto Captions are available now

By
Joshua Hawkins
Josh Hawkins
Joshua Hawkins
Freelance Technology Reporter
  • Full Sail University
Josh Hawkins is a freelance writer for Lifewire who loves writing about the latest tech and gadgets that help make people’s lives easier. As an avid gamer and VR enthusiast, he also enjoys diving deep into the technology that helps bring those kinds of experiences to life.
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Published on October 8, 2021 01:07PM EDT
Fact checked by
Rich Scherr
Rich Scherr
Fact checked by Rich Scherr
  • University of Maryland Baltimore County
Rich Scherr is a seasoned technology and financial journalist who spent nearly two decades as the editor of Potomac and Bay Area Tech Wire.
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YouTube is now testing multi-audio tracks, as well as rolling out its new live auto-captions feature to the general YouTube population.

On Thursday, YouTube revealed that it has begun rolling out multi-audio track support for videos to a small group of creators. The move will let users include multiple audio tracks with their videos, ultimately allowing for multilingual content that lets viewers swap between their respective language tracks. The introduction of multiple audio tracks also will help creators who want to include descriptive audio for blind or low-vision viewers.

YouTube open on a laptop

Nordwood Themes / Unsplash

Additionally, YouTube is more broadly rolling out its live stream auto-captions feature, which previously was only available to users with 1,000 or more subscribers.

The feature allows streamers to set up automatic captions. YouTube is pushing to expand support for the system to all 13 of its supported captioning languages.

The video site also is working to roll out auto-translation for captions on Android and iOS this year. However, this feature is currently only available on the desktop.

A closeup of the YouTube app in a web browser, showing the Home, Trending, and Search features.

Christian Wiediger / Unsplash

In addition, YouTube said it plans to experiment with allowing users to type in a search bar to find specific keywords in a video's transcript. This could allow viewers to more easily scrub content.

YouTube ended its announcement with an update to the coming subtitle editor permission. The company says the feature is currently in development, and it hopes to share more about how creators can add "Subtitle Editors" to their channel in the coming months.

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