ElevenLabs Instant Soundtracks adds music and sound effects

ElevenLabs can now score a video and place its sound effects from a single upload. The company's Instant Soundtracks feature, announced in a blog post on October 15, 2026, takes a clip you hand it, writes original music for the footage, then finds the moments that call for a sound and drops effects at those timestamps.

The draw is doing both jobs in one upload. Until now, adding sound to a finished clip meant three separate jobs: compose or pick a track, cut it to the pictures, then build the sound effects and place each one by hand. ElevenLabs says Instant Soundtracks does the three together, built for the fast cuts of short-form video rather than long film scenes.

Watch the launch video below.

What Is Instant Soundtracks?

Instant Soundtracks is a feature inside ElevenCreative, ElevenLabs' creative app, that generates a soundtrack and synchronized sound effects for a video you upload. ElevenLabs says the model scores the video with original music, then analyzes the footage for sound-effect cues and generates effects aligned to those timestamps. The effects land on the timeline automatically, and the company's own example is a whoosh timed to a logo at the end of an ad.

ElevenLabs is an AI audio company, known first for speech and voice cloning and then for music and sound-effect models. Its video-to-music page describes the earlier version of this tool, which read a video's motion, color, pacing and scene structure to compose a track and returned several musical options per upload, at 44.1kHz stereo. What that tool did not do was place sound effects. Instant Soundtracks is the version that adds them.

The update also sharpens two things ElevenLabs calls out as new: better timing for short-form content and more accurate mood switching across scenes. In the company's example, a fast scene gets EDM or R&B, then the track moves to acoustic guitar for a slower, more intimate one. A creator does not write that change; the model reads the shift from the footage.

The Two Knobs That Matter

Two controls decide whether Instant Soundtracks is a novelty or a tool you keep.

The first is audio-as-reference. You can hand the model your video's existing audio and let it shape the new score around it. ElevenLabs says the model analyzes that audio, its genre, crescendos, beats per minute or instrumentation, and uses it to build music that matches the character of the original instead of starting from nothing. That matters when you have a voiceover or a temp track you like and want the new music to sit under it rather than fight it.

The second is separate tracks. In the ElevenCreative Studio API, three new parameters expose the feature: add_sfx turns on sound-effect detection, separate_tracks splits the output, and use_audio_as_reference turns on the audio matching. With separate_tracks=true, ElevenLabs says the API returns a .ZIP with the music and the sound effects as separate files, so you can mix them downstream in your own pipeline or in Studio. That is the difference between a finished mix you can only accept or reject and two stems you can ride under dialogue.

In the Music Video Editor, the sound effects arrive as separate layers, so you can review and adjust them independently of the soundtrack. You can add more effects, move their timing, swap the music, or fix one moment without starting over, then export from ElevenCreative.

Where You Can Use It

Instant Soundtracks is available now, per the blog post, in four places:

• The Music Video Editor in ElevenCreative's music tab, with the sound effects as a separate layer and the audio-as-reference controls.
• Creative Engine, for adding music and effects to ads.
• The ElevenMusic platform.
• The ElevenCreative Studio API, through the three new parameters.

The Limits

The main cap is per request. The video-to-music API documentation states the endpoint takes up to 10 videos per request, combined up to 200 MB and up to 600 seconds, which is 10 minutes of video. ElevenLabs' post gives the same numbers as 10 videos, 200 MB and 10 minutes combined. The docs note that the videos are combined in order and that combining several clips can lengthen the request significantly, so it advises combining them beforehand when you can.

Two things the announcement does not say: what Instant Soundtracks costs, and which plans include it. The blog post is silent on price, and so is the product page. FrameSignal, a third-party write-up, flags the same gap, and its line that developers need a paid plan is reported there from another news account rather than from ElevenLabs.

One independent test puts a number on usage. The blog Sonetho ran the video-to-music API on a 12.7-second clip and reported 193 credits for music alone and 347 with sound effects and separate tracks, about 80% more. It also found the effects came in quieter than the music and left the last stretch of the clip empty. Those figures are one account of one clip, not an ElevenLabs rate card, and no hands-on test was run for this article.

Where It Fits in a Creator's Week

Instant Soundtracks targets the backlog of finished clips that sit silent because sound is the slow part. If you shoot a batch of short clips and leave them soundless, Instant Soundtracks folds music and effects into one pass you can then fix by hand. The separate tracks are what make the fix possible: pull the sound-effect stem, nudge the whoosh that landed a frame early, keep the music.

For ads, the Creative Engine route and the automatic cue placement go after the same job, an effect on the logo, a transition hit, a texture under the product shot, without a sound designer on the clock. For developers, the API parameters mean the feature can sit inside a rendering pipeline rather than a browser tab.

The open question is quality. Every example in the announcement is ElevenLabs' own, and the post does not say how the model picks cues in noisy, dialogue-heavy footage or how cleanly it separates a score from a busy source track. FrameSignal makes the same point: how well the tool times its sounds rests on ElevenLabs' examples so far. The tool's limits are documented in full; whether it picks the right cue is the part a creator can only settle by running it on their own footage.

Instant Soundtracks is live in ElevenCreative's music tab, Creative Engine, ElevenMusic and the ElevenCreative Studio API. To try it, upload a clip in ElevenCreative and open the music tab, or call the video-to-music endpoint with add_sfx turned on.