Publish a bounce as a video
Mac musicians often finish a track as an AIFF bounce and then want to share it on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. None of these platforms take audio files, and AIFF is also too large and too Mac-specific for most messengers. Converting AIFF to MP4 packs the track and a picture into a standard video that uploads anywhere. Producers use it for release teasers, beat showcases and work-in-progress clips; teachers and podcasters use it for lessons and episodes recorded in GarageBand.
Visual choices
- Cover art or photo: the artwork of your release, a studio photo or a logo.
- Plain colour: a calm background that keeps attention on the music.
- Gradient: two colours of your choice when you have no artwork yet.
- Animated waveform or spectrum: a visualiser that moves with the track, popular for beat videos.
Formats for each platform
| Format | Pixels | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| 1080p | 1920 x 1080 | YouTube premieres, full tracks |
| 720p | 1280 x 720 | quick previews, smaller files |
| Square | 1080 x 1080 | Instagram feed, Facebook |
| Vertical | 1080 x 1920 | Reels, TikTok, Shorts, stories |
For a teaser, cut the strongest 15 to 60 seconds of the bounce first with Cut audio, and use the vertical format.
Audio quality and file size
MP4 stores sound as AAC, so the uncompressed AIFF is encoded once during rendering. Starting from AIFF gives the cleanest possible AAC, better than making the video from an MP3, which would stack two lossy encodes. The platforms re-encode the audio again after upload, so a clean first encode really helps.
A four-minute AIFF of about 42 MB becomes a video of roughly 5 to 10 MB with a still picture. An animated visualiser adds more, because each frame changes. Rendering runs in your browser; long tracks at 1080p with animation take the longest. Leave around 1 dB of headroom in the bounce, or use normalize, so peaks do not clip after AAC encoding. More layouts are available in audio to video.