When Editing Videos Is Easy… But Choosing Music Feels Like Taking an Exam

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my time editing videos. What started as a simple hobby somehow turned into me sitting in front of my laptop for hours, trimming clips, adjusting colors, adding subtitles, and obsessing over tiny details nobody else probably notices.

The funny thing is — editing itself isn’t the hard part anymore.

Thanks to CapCut (which I have to pay), I can actually create videos pretty fast now. Cut here, transition there, add some captions, done. Everything feels smooth and efficient. I finally reached that stage where editing doesn’t feel scary or technical.

But then comes the real nightmare.

Choosing. The. Music.

CapCut has thousands of nice songs. And I mean really nice ones. Cute, trendy, emotional, cinematic — you name it, they have it. Every time I scroll through the music library, I get excited thinking, “Ohhh this one fits perfectly!”

And then… copyright says hello.

TikTok is pretty chill. Upload, done, no drama.

But YouTube?  Different story.

YouTube is like that super strict teacher who checks everything with a microscope.

So many times, I spent ages converting my favourite songs from YouTube into MP3, carefully placing them into my CapCut video, syncing every beat perfectly… only to upload and get hit with: Blocked due to copyright.

Heart pain, really.

Even worse, not just songs — sometimes even short tunes or simple melodies are protected. Like… how?? It’s just five seconds of music 😭

My latest Nana Vietnam Kitchen video nearly broke me. I had to redo the entire video THREE times because of music issues. Three times re-exporting. Three times re-uploading. Three times hoping it would pass.

In the end, I gave up.

No more nice music. No more trendy songs.

I just picked one of those super safe, super boring, very “corporate slideshow” tunes from the YouTube Audio Library.

So yeah… if you ever watch my YouTube videos and think,

“Why the music so old-school ah?”

Now you know.

It’s not my taste.

It’s survival 😂

At this point, editing the video is easy. Fighting copyright is the real full-time job.

Honestly, being a small content creator sometimes feels like 20% creativity and 80% dodging copyright landmines.

But oh well… we adapt, we survive, and we keep posting.

Because at the end of the day, the memories (and the food videos) are still worth sharing — even if the background music sounds like it came from 1985.