Have you received this error message after uploading a new video? It can be pretty frustrating after having created your video, waited for it to render, and then waited for it to upload to find out that the audio has been disabled because it has been identified as copywritten. We’ll save the ethical debate for another post. This post is about how exactly you go about circumventing this filter and successfully uploading videos with this sort of audio content.

Of course, just because this works today, does not necessarily mean it will work tomorrow. Also, you will need to be prepared to sacrficie a bit of audio quality (or at least the integrity of the original audio).

The Solution?

Reverb. That’s right. After all my tweaking of EQ trying to find the right way to skew a track enough to make it unidentifiable, I discovered that getting around the filter was as easy as adding a little bit of reverb. I’m no audio expert, but I’m guessing the reason that it works so well is because adding a healthy amount of reverb seriously alters the digital footprint of the audio file. You can see how different a wav looks after reverb is applied. Basically there is just a bunch of sound data where there wasn’t before, creating a uniqe file. For the user, it just sounds like the song is being played in a large room (depending on the amount of reverb).

My software of choice, Sony Vegas, has this effect built in. I’d imagine that most video editing software packages probably have some sort of default reverb effect, as it is a  pretty common one.

I have so far tested this on three different videos, all of which originally had their audio track disabled. All three have been successfully uploaded and are still live with the reverb-tweaked audio files still in tact.

In some cases, the new sound of the audio will actually complement the video. Personally, I think it sounds pretty cool. I haven’t yet determined the exact amount of reverb that needs to be applied to safely evade the filter, but it’s safe to say that the more you apply, the less chance you’ll have of having any problems.

I know this has been a very frustrating problem for many of you, so hopefully this will make your lives a bit easier! I don’t expect this method to work forever, but until it becomes obsolete, enjoy!

Final Note

In some cases, having your audio match third party content will not cause it to be removed, but rather YouTube will display advertisments on the video that will benefit the rightful copyright holder. This may or may not be a problem for you (the advertisement makes it difficult to use annotations as we’ve talked about here before).