YouTube Adds Chat Rooms, Background Music

YouTube’s labs test site, called TestTube, has added two new features to the service.
The first, called AudioSwap, lets you replace the audio in your video with audio provided by YouTube. The audio on your video will be complete replaced by the new audio, so this is really designed for audio-free videos, like photo slideshows, nature video, or screencasts. There’s a lot of music there, most of which I’ve never heard of, but some familiar, like:

Evanescence
Seether
Drowning Pool
Ray Charles
Creed
Aretha Franklin
Ben E. King

There’s lots of stuff in there, but I’m enormously dissapointed at the complete lack of classical, out-of-copyright music, like some nice Beethoven. Still, useful enough that I’ve used it on one of my screencasts:

Hehe. Creed.

The other new feature, Streams, creates chat rooms for sharing videos and talking about them. Frankly, the “quality” of YouTube’s community could kill this feature outright, but if […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg