Insert music and time it

I want to play music in the background of this slide show and time the slides to fit the music.

Let's do that.

First, I'll insert the music file.

With the first slide displayed, I'll click INSERT, Audio, and Audio on My PC.

I'll select the music file, and click Insert.

The file is placed in the middle of the slide.

It is selected, and the AUDIO TOOLS tabs are available.

To set the music, so it plays in the background, on the PLAYBACK tab, I'll click Play in Background.

Note that this applies the following settings: the Start setting switches from On Click to Automatically.

And these three options are now checked: Play Across Slides, Loop until Stopped, and Hide During Show.

I don't need the music to repeat, so I'll uncheck Loop until Stopped.

While that turns off Play in Background, all the settings that I want are still in place.

Let's click Slide Show to see how this plays.

The music starts automatically and plays continuously, as I click, in the background of my slides.

Now, I want the slides to advance automatically, timed to match the length of the music.

So next, I'll add slide timings.

First, let's see how long the music clip is.

On Slide 1, I'll point to the audio icon to see the playbar. When I point to the end of the playbar, a pop-up shows the clip's total time, 14.89, which is about 15 seconds.

I'll set the slide timings with this in mind.

To set timings, click the TRANSITIONS tab, and under Advance Slide, check the After box. Then, specify a time. I'll click the up arrow to set the slide timing to 1.00 second.

Then, I'll click Apply To All. So, each slide will play for 1 second and then advance.

Now, 1 second per slide may seem too short, but note that the slides have a Fade transition applied too, and the transitions add to the total playing time.

For the last slide, I am going to increase the timing, though. I'll click the up arrow to 4 seconds, because the picture has a Fade animation.

I'll click the ANIMATIONS tab , Preview, so we can see it.

I need to allow time for that fade out.

The playing time for the slides should now be close to the 15 seconds for the music.

For good measure, let's click the SLIDE SHOW tab and make sure Use Timings is checked.

We are ready to see the show.

I'll press F5 to play it from the top.

The slides advance on their own, according to the timings, and the overall time fits with the music.

Finally, here is a file-management tip.

When we clicked Insert to insert the audio file, the file was embedded in the presentation, and that creates a large file size overall.

To reduce file size in a presentation with embedded audio, save the presentation, and click the FILE tab.

On the Info tab, under Properties, you'll see the file's size.

This presentation file is over 8 megabytes.

To make the presentation file smaller and more manageable for sharing, click Compress Media, and choose a type of compression, in terms of quality.

Let's try Internet Quality. The file gets compressed, and the Compress Media window shows the amount of space saved.

We'll close this window. When I save the file, and click FILE again, I see that the file size is reduced almost by half.

If I don't like the result of the compression, I can click Compress Media, Undo.

If you want to avoid the issue of a large file size, another option is to link to the audio file.

To do that, when you first insert the file, click the arrow next to Insert, and click Link to File.

When you present, you need to have access to the linked audio file from the presenting computer.

For more information about this, see the course summary at the end of this course.

Up next: Trim a music clip and fade it out.