How to Add Music to PowerPoint

Understand the process. You can distribute music files throughout a presentation so that the music moves from one track to another. However, any change could result in tracks overlapping or excessively extending the transition time. To keep the background music running smoothly during a long presentation, it’s a good idea to merge the tracks into a continuum and start playing from the beginning.

Download and install Audacity. This is a free and open source audio editor that allows you to quickly merge tracks. You can get it from sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/ .

Open the tracks you want to merge in Audacity. Click the File menu and select “Open…”. If the files are all in the same folder, you can hold down the Ctrl key and select each file to open at once.

Open the window showing the second track. You will add each track after the first track. Therefore, open a window showing the second track in your playlist.

Press Ctrl + A to select the whole song.

Press Ctrl + C to copy the selected track.

Open the window containing the first track and place the cursor at the last position of the track.

Press Ctrl + V to paste the copied track at the end of the first track.

Repeat for each post you want to add.

Eliminate excess silence. You can look at the graph to determine when there is music and when there is no sound. You can remove the silence that comes from joining songs before you add them to PowerPoint.

• Hold and drag to select the quiet part of the track. Don’t erase intentional silences from songs: the music can become forced. You should also pause for a second or two before starting a new exercise.
• Click the “Cut” button at the top of the window to delete the selected portion.

Save the new merge file. After adding the music, you now need to save the new file as MP3 to load it into PowerPoint

• Click the File menu and select “Export Audio…”.
• Don’t forget to select “MP3 Files” for the “Save as type” field.
• Give the file a recognizable name and save it somewhere easy to find.
• Click Save then OK , unless you want to change the MP3 tag information.
• Wait for the file export to complete. It may take a few minutes for Audacity to combine and save your new MP3 file.

Insert this file into PowerPoint. Follow the steps at the beginning of this article to insert the merge file into PowerPoint and have it run in the background automatically.

Open the slide you want to start playing music on. To play music right from the start of your presentation, open your first slide. To play music from a specific location in your presentation, open the slide where you want the music to start playing.

Click the Insert tab, click the “Sounds” button and then “Sound from File”. Now you can browse WAV and MP3 files.

• With Office 2003, click the Insert menu, select “Movies and Sounds”, and then select “Sound from File”.
• Because PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 can’t embed MP3 files, it’s best to create a new folder on your computer and put the presentation in the same place as the audio file.
• You can embed a WAV file, but doing so can make the presentation very heavy. Therefore, linking to the MP3 file is the more recommended practice.

Specify how to start playing music. In the “Sound” tab you can choose “Automatically” or “When Clicked” from the “Play Sound” menu.

• If you choose to play automatically, check the “Hide During Show” box to hide the audio file controls.

Right click on the new audio object and select “Custom Animation”. Usually the music stops playing as soon as you move on to the next slide. With custom effects, you can keep the music playing. ^[2]

Click the “Multimedia Settings” tab and select “Continue slide show”.

Select “After” and then select the number of music slides to continue before stopping. To play background music throughout the presentation, use the total number of slides included in the presentation. Press “OK” when the setting is complete.