YouTube Shorts: Seedance 2.5 audio on, off or detached, same price

A 15-second 9:16 Seedance 2.5 clip costs $8.67 at 720p on Sume whether generate_audio is true or false. Audio is optional on this model and the estimate has no audio term, so the choice is about the edit, not the bill. If you want the generated sound as its own track, Sume's audio detach job pulls it out of the finished video for $0.01 per job.

The reason this is a live question: the YouTube Shorts editor now separates audio and video tracks, according to a HeyOrca roundup (secondary source, read 2026-10-07). A clip with a silent or separable audio track fits that workflow better than one with sound baked in.

Three ways to handle the sound

Detach, step by step

Audio detach takes one video from your workspace (media.sume.com), returns a new audio artifact (wav by default) and leaves the video unchanged. It needs an Idempotency-Key header. The finished video must already be a workspace file; import it first if it lives elsewhere. See the audio detach docs (read 2026-10-07).

curl -X POST "https://api.sume.com/v1/audio-detach" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: shorts-detach-001" \
  -d '{"video_url": "https://media.sume.com/your-workspace-video.mp4"}'

Which to choose

Pick generate_audio: false when you already know you will replace the sound. A generated track you throw away is not billed separately here, but it can mislead a review of the first take. Pick the detach route when the generated sound is a starting point.

A 15-second vertical clip fits a Short. Keep each clip near the length of one beat and join them on a timeline rather than asking for 30 seconds of one scene.