Next week we are teaching a workshop on adding audio to PowerPoint 2010. I was very excited by how easy this is to do because I could see faculty using it to enhance their courses, both online and f2f. While it’s true that recording audio on a slide is pretty simple, doing anything more interesting is quite tricky.
I need to do a bit more research, but i think the key is to work with the audio file itself as though it were an animation. After you insert the file, open the Animation Pane. Click on the audio object and then right click the item in the Animation Pane. This allows you to go into the Effect Options. Here you will find many useful settings that will help you make the file do what you want it to do. Let me walk through the project I just spend 2.5 hours figuring out.
Project: Create an automated video with music playing in the background for all slides and my voice on each slide.
Step 1: Create the presentation with no bells and whistles
Step 2: Write and record the script
I wrote the script in the Notes section of PPT and then used a two column table in Word to put in one place so i could use it for recording. I used one column in the table to identify the slide and the other to insert the correlating script. If I do this again in the future, I might elaborate here and make it more of a storyboard.
Then I went into Audacity and recorded the script. I used Audacity because of its editing features which are superior to PPT’s editing. I saved a file for each slide and exported them to mp3 files. I know that some people prefer to record one audio file when doing voice overs but for me this is just easier. I would not want to have to play with a voice over in PPT to get the timing right to play over all slides.
Step 3: Choose your music
I went to http://www.incompetech.com/ to find royalty free music for my background. I settled on a piece that is a mixture of African vocal chants and Caribbean-styled percussion and bass guitar called, “At the Shore.” I discovered that there is a couple of seconds of silence at the end of this piece which made the loop sound horrible, so I opened the file in Audacity and deleted the silence. I exported to an mp3 file and saved over the original. This worked perfectly.
Step 4: Insert the music file
I went to the first slide and did Insert > Audio file. The speaker icon and its companion slider bar showed up. I clicked on it and then went the Playback section of the Audio Tools tab. I chose the following settings:
Fade Duration: 0
I was tempted to play with this but the music was too short to cover the whole presentation and I didn’t feel like creating an audio file that would play long enough (You can do this in Audacity by copying and pasting the same track over and over after itself for as long of a duration as you need). Since I had to loop the music I chose not to use the Fade.
Volume: Low
Since I knew I was going to do a voice over for this I left the volume low.
Start: On Click
I played and played with this setting but ended up deciding to start the presentation with a click rather than automatically. Learner control and all that 
Hide During Show: check
This keeps the ugly speaker icon hidden while the slide show is playing. In this case I decided to hide it but if you want to go for learner control, especially if you have content heavy slides, you could keep it unchecked.
Loop until Stopped: check
Like I said earlier, I did this because my audio file was too short for my presentation. Be careful with this, sometimes it can sound stupid. And when you’re teaching something with PowerPoint, it may be better to limit the music to the beginning and/or end of the presentation so as not to contribute to cognitive overload.
Rewind after Playing: uncheck
Once these settings were in place, I went to Animations > Animation Pane. In the Animation Pane you will see a list of the animations for that slide. Right click on the music file. At the top of the drop down you see three choices for how to begin the animation:
Start On Click means the animation will begin when the user clicks the mouse on the slide
Start With Previous means the animation will begin at the same time as the one scheduled to before it.
Start After Previous means the animation will begin after the one scheduled to run before it.
The bottom section of the drop down is where a lot of the power lies for making a self-running presentation:
Effect Options has three tabs: Effect, Timing and Audio Settings. I’m not going to go into what each and every setting does. Here are the settings that I chose for this project:
Effect Tab
Start Playing: From Beginning
Stop Playing: After: 8 slides (this is the duration of the presentation to make sure the file played the entire time)
Enhancements: I left the default
Timing Tab
Start: On Click (this is the same setting that is used in the Playback Tab)
Delay: 0 seconds (I chose zero so that the music would start as soon as I clicked)
Duration: left blank
Repeat: default is “Until the End of Slide” which is how I left it
Under the Triggers section (which I had to open) I chose Animate as part of c lick sequence. Originally this was not chosen but when I clicked it it worked. I’m not sure why. I just know it worked
Under the Audio Settings tab I changed nothing.
Step 5: Insert the voice over file
On the first slide I inserted the mp3 voice file with the following settings:
Volume: High
Hide During Show: Checked
I left everything else as default
to be continued….
