47 About Importing Existing Digital Files

Before You Begin

7 About Making Audio a Priority

46 About Movie Maker Audio

See Also

48 Add a Soundtrack to Your Video

Movie Maker supports the import of audio files that have the following filename extensions: .aif, .aifc, .aiff, .asf, .au, .mp2, .mp3, .mpa, .snd, .wav , and .wma . Of these 11 types, .mp3 (called MPEG), .wav (called wave ), and .wma (from Windows Media Player) are by far the most common.

As with imported video content, when Movie Maker imports audio files, the files appear in your Collections pane. Actually, a representation of the audio file appears in your Collections pane.

TIP

At first, Movie Maker seems to limit you by not letting you move or rename audio files you import. By keeping the file on the disk (as opposed to the alternative of copying the file's contents directly into your project) you can change the imported audio file, and that change will automatically appear in your project without requiring you to import the file once again.

Movie Maker never makes a copy of your imported audio file ”it only links to that file from your Collections pane. Therefore, you cannot move, rename, or delete an audio file after you've imported it into your collection; otherwise , Movie Maker won't be able to locate the file. If you move the file to another location, you will have to import the audio file once again into your project's collection.

Microsoft created Movie Maker to adhere to digital rights management encoding. Therefore, if your audio file is protected in some way by digital rights management, you will be unable to import the audio file into your project. For more information about digital rights management, see 21 Import Video into Movie Maker .

NOTE

Because Movie Maker creates no copy of your audio file, if you delete an audio clip in your Contents pane, the audio file still remains on your disk unchanged.