Soundtrack
Also known as: score, audio track
The complete audio of a finished video, music and camera sound and effects together, rather than just the music laid underneath it.
Updated
What it means
A soundtrack properly means everything a viewer hears: the music, whatever the camera recorded, any effects added and any speech. In casual use it often means only the music, which hides how much the other layers contribute.
Treating it as the whole mix changes the decisions. The question stops being which track to use and becomes how the layers sit against each other, which is what makes a video sound finished rather than scored.
On action footage the balance is unusual. Camera audio is mostly unusable, so the Music bed carries far more of the load than it would in almost any other kind of video.
How it works in practice
The layers are built in a fixed order. Music first because it sets the structure, camera sound underneath it for grounding, effects on specific frames, and speech on top of everything whenever it exists.
Levels are then set as relationships rather than individually. What matters is how far the camera track sits under the music, not what either measures on its own, and Audio ducking maintains that relationship automatically.
The whole mix is measured at the end against a loudness target, because a platform reads the finished result rather than any of the layers that went into it.
What to watch out for
Mixing music against camera audio clip by clip produces an unstable result. The relationship has to hold across the whole video, or the balance shifts every time the footage changes.
Removing camera sound entirely is the most common overcorrection. A video with nothing but music feels like a slideshow, because every trace of Ambient sound that proved the footage came from a real place has gone.
Checking only on headphones is the other. Small speakers lose the low end that carries weight, so a mix that is thin on a phone has failed where most viewers actually are, and no amount of Normalization rescues it.
How RawClip handles it
The finished audio is a mix rather than a music track with pictures: cleared music carries the structure, camera sound stays underneath for grounding, and speech comes forward where it exists. The whole result is mastered to one loudness target.