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Placing a Sound Icon on a Slide
The most elementary way to use a sound file in a presentation is to place the sound clip directly on the slide as an object. An icon appears for it, and you can click the icon to play the sound during the presentation, or you can set it up to play automatically.| Tip | To "hide" the sound icon, drag it off the edge of the slide. The sound will still work, but the audience won't see the icon. Of course, you won't be able to click it during the presentation, so you'll need to set it up to play automatically. |
You can either place a sound from the Clip Organizer or insert a sound file from your computer, the same as with clip art (see Chapter 9). However, many experts recommend that you not use the Clip Organizer for organizing and inserting sounds because the path where Clip Organizer files are stored is typically several levels deep on the hard disk (or on the Internet), which makes it awkward for the sound file to be linked. (And remember, unless it's a WAV file, it's always linked rather than embedded.)
Working with Sounds in the Clip Organizer
Everything you learned in Chapter 9 about the Clip Organizer applies to sound files as well as artwork. Choose Insert⇨Movies and Sounds⇨Sound from Clip Organizer to display the Clip Art pane with the file type set for Sounds (see Figure 12-1). Notice that when you access the Clip Organizer this way, the Results Should Be setting is automatically set to Sounds only. If you access the Clip Organizer in some other way, you would need to manually change this setting to find only the sound clips. You can enter keywords to narrow down the choices the same as you do with artwork.
Figure 12-1: Search the Clip Organizer for sounds from your hard disk and from Microsoft's Office and Web collections.
| Note | The icon for the sound clips in the Clip Organizer pane may vary depending on what application is configured as the default player for wave files on your PC. On my PC the default is the Apple iTunes player, for example. |
With clip art, you see previews of the clips before you insert them, but with sound files, the icon is generic for all sounds. Therefore, you will probably want to preview various clips before selecting one. To do so, right-click a clip and choose Preview/Properties. In the Preview/Properties dialog box that appears, play the clip (click the Play button if the clip does not play automatically). To preview other clips without closing the dialog box each time, click the Next Clip button (see Figure 12-2).
Figure 12-2: Preview a clip in the Preview/Properties box.
One thing that's different for sounds versus images is that a dialog box appears asking when you want the sound to play: Automatically or When Clicked (see Figure 12-3). If you choose Automatically, the sound will play automatically when the slide appears. Otherwise, it will play as specified by its animation settings.
Figure 12-3: Specify when the sound should play.
| Note | Setting a sound clip to play automatically sets up a custom animation for it that makes the sound play After Previous, where the previous event is the appearance of the slide itself. That makes it seem like the sound is playing automatically when the slide appears, but those are actually two separate events. In Chapter 14 you will learn about fine-tuning custom animations. |
Inserting a Sound From a File
As you learned in Chapter 9, you can insert your own clips into the Clip Organizer to make them accessible from there, but if you're just going to use the clip once, it makes more sense to insert it from a file instead.To insert from a file, choose Insert⇨Movies and Sounds⇨Sound from File. Then, select and insert the sound the same as you would any other file (a picture, for Chapter 8). You see the same dialog box as shown in Figure 12-3, prompting you to indicate whether the sound should play automatically or when clicked.
Embedding or Linking Sound Files
When you insert a sound using the Insert⇨Movies and Sounds⇨Sound from File command, or use the Clip Organizer, WAV files smaller than a certain size will be embedded, while sounds larger than that specified size will be linked. This is automatic; you can't directly choose which files to link and which to embed.However, you can change the cutoff point for the file size. To do so, follow these steps:
Choose Tools⇨Options.
Click the General tab.
Enter a file size in the Link sound files greater than __ kb box.
Click OK.
So which is better-embedded or linked? It all depends on your priorities. Embedded sound files travel automatically with the presentation file, so you do not have to worry about copying them separately if you copy the presentation file. However, they do add to the size of the PowerPoint file. Linked sound files take up virtually no space in the presentation file, but they must be available whenever the presentation is shown.
| Tip | If you plan on a sound file being linked, place it in the same folder as the presentation file before inserting it. This will ensure a relative reference to the link, so that when you move the files to another location the link will retain its integrity. |
Sources of Sound Files
There are sound collections available all over the Internet, just like there are clip art collections. You can also buy sound collections on CD. If you find yourself putting together lots of presentations, or searching the Internet for hours to find specific sounds for this or that purpose, you might find it more cost-effective to simply buy a good collection of sounds.Here are some Web sites where you can find some sounds:
A1 Free Sound Effects (www.alfreesoundeffects.com/noflash). Lots of free sounds for non-commercial use. You can also buy them for commercial use quite cheaply.
Microsoft (http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2002/Sounds.aspx). Microsoft offers a nice collection of free sounds to work with Office versions 2000 and higher. Add them to the Clip Organizer for easy retrieval later.
Partners in Rhyme (www.musicloops.com). Sound and music collections are for sale, plus some free ones for download. Their background music clips are cool because they are set up for perfect looping-that is, continuous play without a noticeable break between the end and the beginning.
The Microsoft Clip Organizer (see Chapter 9) can also be a source of sounds from Microsoft's collection of clips. Although the collection of sounds is not as extensive as that of clip art, you may be able to find something of use. The Clip Organizer searches http://dgl.microsoft.com.
