Adding a CD Audio Soundtrack


A lot of great music is available on CD these days, and most computers contain a CD-ROM drive that reads not only computer CDs but also plays audio CDs. PowerPoint takes advantage of this feature by letting you play tracks from an audio CD during your presentation.

Adding a CD audio clip to a slide is much like adding a regular sound clip. You place the clip on the slide and a little CD icon appears to allow you to activate the clip. You can then set properties for the clip to make it play exactly the way you want. However, the difference is that the audio track is not stored with the presentation file. Therefore, the audio CD must be in the CD drive of the computer that you are using to present the show. You cannot use CD audio tracks in presentations that you plan to distribute as self-running presentations on a data CD or over the Internet, because the computers on which it will run will not have access to the CD.

EXPERT TIP 

If you need to include audio from a CD in a presentation that will be shown on a PC that does not have access to the original audio CD, you can record a part of the CD track as a WAV file. To do this, you can use the Windows Sound Recorder program or another audio-recording utility. However, keep in mind that WAV files can be extremely large and can take up many megabytes for less than a minute of sound. To keep the file size smaller, consider using an MP3 or an ASF file instead of a WAV file. As always, make sure that you are not violating any copyright laws.

Placing a CD Soundtrack Icon on a Slide

To play a CD track for a slide, you must place an icon for it on the slide. You can actually place a range of tracks, such as multiple tracks from a CD, using a single icon. To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Insert the CD in your PC.

  2. On the Insert tab, click the Sound drop-down arrow and then click Play Audio CD Track. The Insert CD Audio dialog box appears.

  3. Specify the starting track number in the Start at Track text box in the Clip selection section, as shown in Figure 16.12.

    image from book
    Figure 16.12: You can specify a starting and ending track, as well as a time within those tracks.

  4. Specify the ending track number in the End at Track text box. If you want to play only a single track, the Start at Track and End at Track numbers should be the same. The start or end time changes only after you click one of the up-or down-arrows next to the time. For example, if you want to play tracks 1, 2, and 3, you should select track 1 as the start track and track 3 as the end track (as opposed to track 4).

  5. If you want to begin the starting track at a particular spot (other than the beginning), enter this start time in the Time text box for that track. For example, to start the track 50 seconds into the song, you would type 00:50.

  6. By default, PowerPoint plays an entire track. If you want to stop the ending track at a particular spot, enter this end time in the Time text box for that track. For example, in Figure 16-12, track 1 is the starting track, and track 4 is the ending track, at 2:57 seconds long. If you want to end track 4 ten seconds early, you can change the Time setting under End to 2:47. You can see the total playing time at the bottom of the dialog box.

  7. (Optional) You can adjust the volume with the Sound Volume button.

  8. Click OK. A message appears, asking whether you want the sound to play Automatically or When Clicked. Make your selection. Depending on your choice, the CD track activates either when the slide appears (Automatically) or when you click its icon during the presentation (When Clicked).

  9. The CD icon now appears in the center of the slide. You can drag it off the edge of the slide if it interferes with your slide content. You can also resize it if you want, just like any other object.

  10. In the Custom Animation pane, open the menu for the CD icon and select Effect Options. Type a number in the Stop Playing After ___ Slides text box. Keep in mind that, in this context, PowerPoint considers each transition (whether backward or forward) a "slide," and so typing 999 in this text box ensures that your soundtrack will play throughout the entire presentation. (You can also do this by setting the Play Track setting on the Options tab to Play Across Slides.)

EXPERT TIP 

You can play any number of tracks from a single CD using a single icon, as long as they are contiguous and you play them in their default order. If you need non-contiguous tracks from the CD, or in a different order, or you just want certain segments of some of the clips, then you must place each clip individually on the slide, and then control their order in Custom Animation. See Chapter 18 for details. If you do not want the icons to appear on the slide, then drag them off the slide's edge.

The CD track is now an animated object on your slide. By animated, I mean that it is an object that has some action associated with it.

EXPERT TIP 

To play CD tracks across multiple slides, you must use custom animation, and you must set the sound to stop playing after 999 slides. Chapter 18 covers custom animation in more detail, but this is briefly how it works: Suppose you have a 30-slide presentation, and you want to play tracks 2, 4, and 6 from your CD, each for 10 slides. On slide 1, you would insert track 2, and set its custom animation to stop playing after 999 slides. Then you would do the same for track 4 on slide 11, and track 6 on slide 21.

Editing the CD Track Start and End Times

To specify which track you want to play and where you want to start it, do the following:

  1. Click the CD icon on the slide.

  2. Display the CD Audio Tools Options tab, and set new values in the Start Playing and Stop Playing text boxes, as shown in Figure 16.13. This is an alternative to opening the Play Audio CD dialog box again (from the CD clip's menu in the Custom Animation pane).

    image from book
    Figure 16.13: You can adjust the CD track times from the Options tab.

Controlling When a CD Track Plays

You can set many of the same properties for a CD track on a slide that you can for a sound file icon. You can also use the Custom Animation controls to specify precisely when and how a track will play. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Display the Custom Animation pane from the Animations tab.

  2. Select the CD icon on the slide. A gray box appears around its name in the Custom Animation pane.

  3. Open the drop-down menu for the selected clip and choose Effect Options. This opens the Play CD Audio dialog box.

From this point, the options are exactly the same as those for regular sound files that you have learned about earlier in this chapter. Refer back to the "Fine-tuning Sound Play Settings" section earlier in this chapter for details. All of the same tabs are available, including Effect, Timing, and Sound Settings.




Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Bible
Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 Bible
ISBN: 0470144939
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 268
Authors: Faithe Wempen

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