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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

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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
1,017.3 KB Adding Audio - Completed.pptx
11.4 MB

Quick reference

Topic

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:
    • 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 Inserting audio onto slides is something that I found difficult to do from time to
  • 00:07 time, but it's easier to do if you follow a few principles.
  • 00:11 Now notice on this slide that I've got four images inserted, and they are all and
  • 00:15 it doesn't even matter if certain parts of the images go beyond the slide boundary,
  • 00:19 because nobody will see those parts.
  • 00:22 And I would like to add some music to run with the presentations, so
  • 00:24 when the animations are running I hit the escape on the keyboard to stop them,
  • 00:29 go to the insert tab, and the audio track down arrow.
  • 00:33 We can select from audio on my pc or even record audio,
  • 00:36 which is a subject of another video.
  • 00:38 So, I click Audio on my PC.
  • 00:41 The file that I'm looking for happens to be located here.
  • 00:44 And notice the little arrow beside the Insert button,
  • 00:47 which allows us to wire that directly Insert the audio or link to file.
  • 00:51 I personally wouldn't link to file, unless you've got a very good reason to do so,
  • 00:55 because if you do so, then you will need to make sure that the audio file goes with
  • 01:00 the presentation, or the person receiving it will not hear audio.
  • 01:05 So, we go insert and there is our audio icon on the slide.
  • 01:09 I'll just grab the little handles of that audio icon and
  • 01:12 drag with the mouse to expand it to make it a little big bigger.
  • 01:16 I'll also remove move this audio icon up the slide up here.
  • 01:20 Notice that when the audio icon is selected that we can see
  • 01:23 the audio timeline, and that is the way we can play the audio.
  • 01:27 Very nice.
  • 01:29 But we can also scrub along the audio timeline to a particular location with
  • 01:34 our mouse.
  • 01:34 Bump it backwards and forwards in gross small increments.
  • 01:39 And we get a time indicator of the position where we are as well as
  • 01:43 being able to change the actual volume level to either increase or
  • 01:47 decrease that volume level.
  • 01:49 Now notice in the animation pane that the audio is set to play on click.
  • 01:54 So, I click the audio entry with the mouse and
  • 01:56 drag it up to the commencement on the top of the timeline.
  • 02:01 Now when I run the slide show the sound will commence when I click, and
  • 02:05 the animation of the pictures will follow.
  • 02:08 So, let's go to reading view, click and so
  • 02:12 the sound five at the first picture animated and so forth.
  • 02:17 Hit escape on the keyboard, and
  • 02:19 we're out of reading view back into our application window.
  • 02:23 If I wanted to fire that animation sequence without a mouse click.
  • 02:27 I would go to the start drop down button with previous and
  • 02:31 in reading view which is really a slide show in a window,
  • 02:34 the animation sequence commences automatically.
  • 02:41 Now we're really starting to get into the whole area of animation, and
  • 02:44 animation is really a subject of other videos.
  • 02:47 Now if I move the sound icon off the slide, so that nobody's
  • 02:50 going to see it during the slide show, however if we go to the playback tab,
  • 02:54 we can see located here are various audio options, including to start automatically.
  • 03:00 We can change the volume from low to medium, high, or even mute it.
  • 03:05 We can have it play across slides, and even have the sound
  • 03:08 loop from the end of the audio to the start of it, until some other event occurs
  • 03:13 that stops the sound file, such as moving to the next slide in our slideshow.
  • 03:19 So, let's change the fade in option to fade in over five seconds.
  • 03:26 We won't concern ourselves with adding a fadeout period just yet.
  • 03:30 We go to reading view, and so that's the result of that,
  • 03:34 the song gradually fades in and it sounds quite nice.
  • 03:37 Now if we look at this last entry in our animation time line,
  • 03:40 that animation will conclude at about 22 seconds.
  • 03:44 However, the particular audio file runs for approximately a minute.
  • 03:48 So, what I'd like to do now is to actually trim the end of the video.
  • 03:50 So click the Playback tab, Trim Audio, and I grab the handle, or the marker that
  • 03:55 shows the end of the audio, and I can drag that back to approximately 22 seconds.
  • 04:02 Or I can use the spinner or
  • 04:03 even type in the exact value directly into the End Time field.
  • 04:07 Click OK and the audio was trimmed to about a 22 second mark.
  • 04:12 So, let's add a second fade out at the end of the audio, and
  • 04:16 let's play that and see what happens.
  • 04:39 Now the audio actually stopped a little bit too soon before the end animation
  • 04:44 sequence, so I need to actually extend the end trim point a little bit, so
  • 04:49 we go back to the playback tab, the trim audio button.
  • 04:53 We can extend that trim point a little bit,
  • 04:55 provided that we haven't compressed the audio, because then we would lose that.
  • 05:00 So, we give ourselves a little bit more time, and
  • 05:02 any original trimming is entirely able to be undone.
  • 05:06 Now if I right-click on that sound entry in the Animation Pane,
  • 05:09 we get the Play Audio dialogue box.
  • 05:11 So we can play from beginning, stop playing on click or
  • 05:15 after current slide, or after a number of slides.
  • 05:19 Don't be scared of inserting and using audio, try inserting it,
  • 05:23 remember that you can drag it off the slide, so your audience can't see it, and
  • 05:27 that's the option I prefer even though you can set a check mark to hide it.
  • 05:31 You can fade in and fade out, you can trim and note that bookmarks are a subject
  • 05:35 of another video, because they are really about firing animations.

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