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About this lesson

Insert sound on your slides so that your presentation can play music, narration or other sound effects.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2010, 2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Adding Audio.pptx
11.4 MB Adding Audio - Solution.pptx
11.4 MB

Quick reference

Adding Audio

Inserting audio into a slide.

When to use

To add sound associated with an animation, a slide transition, or to play on its own.

Instructions

  • On the Insert tab, in the Media group, click the Audio drop-down arrow, and then click either:
    • Audio on My PC, or
    • Record Audio.

Online audio

  • Click within the search bar, type in a search term, and either press Enter on the keyboard or click the search icon.
  • Select an audio icon, and click Insert.

Audio on your computer

  • Browse to the appropriate audio file on your computer, select it, and click either:
    • Insert to insert the file, or
    • The Insert drop-down arrow and select Link to File. Note that if you link to the audio file, the audio file must be distributed with the presentation or the audio won’t play.

In this version of PowerPoint, audio is embedded into the presentation by default.

When you insert audio into a presentation, PowerPoint will set it to play when clicked.

Record audio

  • On the Insert tab, select Audio > Record Audio.
    • Choose a name for the recording, and hit Record (red circle).
    • When you have finished recording, hit the Stop button (blue square).
    • Your audio is now inserted into your presentation. Click the play button to play it.
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  • 00:04 This video is about inserting audio onto slides.
  • 00:08 Now, I have four images on this slide that are a little bit higgledy-piggledy, but
  • 00:12 it doesn't matter because each image is larger than the slide boundary.
  • 00:16 If I go to Reading View, which runs our slideshow in a window,
  • 00:21 there is our first image that animates in, another fade.
  • 00:26 And as I said, the images are larger than the side boundary, so
  • 00:29 you can't really tell that they're all in different locations.
  • 00:33 Hit Escape on the keyboard.
  • 00:35 Now, inserting audio is as simple as the insert tab within the media group,
  • 00:40 the audio split button, we can record audio or audio on my PC, I select that.
  • 00:47 Browse to the appropriate folder and select the audio that I wanna pick.
  • 00:52 Notice the little drop down split button, I can link to file.
  • 00:56 I would encourage you not to do that unless you've got a very good reason
  • 00:59 you would need to distribute the audio with the file, and it's very easy for
  • 01:04 it to get lost.
  • 01:06 So click Insert, and there is both the audio and the icon on our slide.
  • 01:10 We drag that off to give us a little bit of space.
  • 01:13 We can enlarge that, it has no impact on the actual audio.
  • 01:17 And we get a timeline, so we can play.
  • 01:22 That's some keyboard audio I recorded a while ago.
  • 01:26 Pause, we can scrub along the timeline, bump forwards or backwards.
  • 01:33 We got a little time indicator to indicate where in the timeline we are,
  • 01:37 as well as this icon lets us move a slider to increase or decrease the volume.
  • 01:43 While that icon is selected on the playback tab in the audio tools,
  • 01:48 we can change the volume to low medium or high, which is bit like the slider.
  • 01:53 Change the sequence and we will look at that shortly.
  • 01:58 Play across slides, loop until stopped and so forth.
  • 02:05 So let's go to the Animations tab, and click the Animation pane button.
  • 02:11 Give ourselves a little bit of room, and there we can see the animations.
  • 02:16 So this particular animation of the start of the audio is set to
  • 02:20 play on click, and it's after the previous animation.
  • 02:26 So we'll grab that with a mouse, drag that to the top.
  • 02:29 Go into Reading View > Play, and even though the screen has flashed,
  • 02:33 nothing happens until I click the mouse.
  • 02:36 Which is our fire event and
  • 02:38 the first animation brings up that image as well as plays the music.
  • 02:43 Escape, if I wanted to, I could play with previous so
  • 02:49 that that will play automatically when we go into reading mode, and there we are.
  • 02:55 The animation comes in bringing that image as well as the audio playing.
  • 02:59 Now, that's really cool.
  • 03:00 Now, a little bit of timing.
  • 03:02 If we look at this particular image and hover our mouse over,
  • 03:07 it says that it ends at 14 seconds.
  • 03:10 I get we can see from the timeline scrubber that this goes to
  • 03:14 more than a minute, and one thing that we can is actually trim the audio.
  • 03:18 We go to the playback tab, trim audio, and
  • 03:22 if we drag this slider roughly back to about 14 seconds, or if we want to,
  • 03:28 we can use the little spinner, or type in the number here exactly and click OK.
  • 03:34 And that audio is now trimmed.
  • 03:36 So let's play that and run the whole sequence and see how it goes.
  • 03:54 And then the slideshow is still running but the audio has stopped.
  • 03:57 So maybe you might need to make that a little bit longer, so
  • 04:00 go back to trim audio.
  • 04:01 And provided we haven't compressed the presentation.
  • 04:04 We can actually drag that out a little bit and make that a little bit longer.
  • 04:09 While we're here, we will fade in to two seconds and fade out to two seconds.
  • 04:17 It can run in our reading view.
  • 04:22 The audio gradually fades in, that's quite a nice effect, very good.
  • 04:28 Inserting audio is very simple on the insert tab within the media group.
  • 04:33 You can insert audio from the PC.
  • 04:35 I would suggest that you insert it rather than link to file.
  • 04:39 You can change the playback arrangement in the Animation task Pane.
  • 04:45 But also, while that audio is selected, you have a Play,
  • 04:48 a Scrub, a Bump button, an indicator of where on the timeline you are.
  • 04:53 As well as you can trim the audio, either the start or the conclusion,
  • 04:58 which is a very handy option Bookmarks are really the subject of other videos.
  • 05:04 So I have a play with audio on your computer whether it's music or speaking.
  • 05:09 There are some quite good adjustments that
  • 05:13 you can make right within PowerPoint.

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