Just adding a soundtrack can greatly enhance the relevance of a PowerPoint presentation. All music can be added to PowerPoint, as long as the software format requirements are met.
> Download: The guide to including visual storytelling in your content strategy.” align=”middle”/>This article details how to put music on PowerPoint in just a few steps.
Table of Contents
What type of audio file is supported by PowerPoint?
PowerPoint supports universal audio formats and those from the Windows environment, ie files with the following extensions: .mp3 (MPEG-3 audio file), .mp4 (MPEG-4 audio file),. wav (Waveform audio file) and .wma (Windows Media Audio file).
How to put music on PowerPoint?
Go to “Insertion”, then “Audio”
To start, the user needs to open the PowerPoint software and then the PPT file to edit. Then, to add an audio track, you have to go to the “Insert” tab, then to “Audio”, to the right of the PowerPoint menu.
Select the desired audio file on the computer
After clicking “Audio”, PowerPoint opens a dialog box named “Insert Audio Object”. This gives access to audio files saved on the user’s computer.
To open an audio file in PowerPoint, you must first go to the folder where it is saved, then click on it. It is advisable to prefer the MPEG-3 format so as not to overload the final weight of the PowerPoint presentation and, thus, facilitate its transfer by e-mail or on a file sharing platform.
Double-click on the megaphone icon
After the audio document is uploaded to PowerPoint, a checkbox appears on the opened slide. This is a megaphone-shaped icon that plays the audio file either on the open slide or on all slides in the presentation.
To access the playback and audio format options, double-click on this icon.
Go to the “reading” tab of the menu
By double-clicking on the icon, the user has access to the menu called “Reading”. From this menu, it is possible to:
- Split the audio file into several pieces.
- Set audio content to play on all slides.
- Repeat the music until the end of the presentation, if necessary.
- Melt the sound volume in or out.
- Adjust the volume of the music to tune it, if necessary, to the other sound effects of the presentation.
If necessary, cut the audio file
Sometimes the design of a PowerPoint presentation invites you to use only an excerpt from an audio file or to integrate several different pieces. In these example cases, it is then necessary to cut the selected audio file after following the above steps.
To do this, the user must click on the “Trim audio” tab. A specific block is then displayed to indicate the total duration of the audio file. It also contains a simplified timeline bar to split the audio track into as many pieces as desired using vertical bars.
Once the cutting is done, you must click on “Cut”.
Add effects to the soundtrack
The final step is to customize the chosen soundtrack so that it blends in with the content and structure of the PowerPoint presentation. To do this, refer to the “Reading” section.
The different segments of this menu section allow, for example, to adjust the sound volume during the oral presentation (that is to say to make the music less loud when the presenter has to speak), to start an excerpt musical simultaneously with the launch of a particular slide or to have the piece of music restart if the presentation is not yet finished.
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