Instagram says muted Reels are shown less: check has_audio

Instagram's help page about the kinds of Reels you may see says you may see less often Reels that are muted, blurry or low resolution, that carry borders, logos or watermarks, that have most of the picture covered by text, or that are not original. For the first item, the check is cheap: run Sume's video inspect on the file and read has_audio. If it is false, the clip has no audio track, and a Timeline render can add one. Instagram's help page renders in the browser and could not be fetched as plain text, so the wording here comes from the search excerpt of that page on 2026-10-08. Open the page to confirm before you rely on it.

What the probe tells you

The probe returns has_audio as a boolean, plus audio_codec, audio_channels and audio_sample_rate. Sending frames: false skips the stills. A false value means there is no audio stream. A true value only means a stream exists: it can still be silent, so listen to the file or look at the transcript. Video inspect can transcribe with transcribe: true at $0.01 per audio minute, and it returns inspect_source_has_no_audio when there is nothing to transcribe, which is itself a muted-clip signal.

Adding sound

Timeline 1.0 builds one MP4 from an audio spine and ordered video slots. Send audio.url for a voiceover or music file on media.sume.com with duration_seconds equal to the clip length, and a video[] slot with start: 0 and the same duration. Add an optional soundtrack bed with gain_db, loop and fade_out_seconds up to 10. The docs describe the sound as coming from audio and soundtrack, and they do not describe carrying a slot's own audio, so treat the spine as the sound of the output.

{
  "audio": {
    "url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/voice.wav",
    "duration_seconds": 15
  },
  "video": [
    {
      "source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/silent-clip.mp4",
      "start": 0,
      "duration": 15
    }
  ]
}

Cost and handling

Timeline is priced at $0.10 per ceiling output minute, so a 15-second render is $0.10. Send an Idempotency-Key, poll GET /v1/jobs/:id/status, and read GET /v1/jobs/:id/result for the new video_url. The default output is 1080x1920, which suits Reels.

What it does not do

Sume does not know how Instagram ranks anything, and adding sound to a clip does not promise more reach. The page says muted Reels may be shown less often; it publishes no numbers. If the clip is meant to be silent, such as a looping product background, burned captions carry the message instead, and the video captions API takes authored cues for a clip with no speech.