MacPPT: How to Play Sounds Across Multiple Slides

This article describes how to play Wave and/or MIDI files across multiple slides within a PowerPoint for Macintosh presentation.

NOTE: PowerPoint for Macintosh cannot play MIDI files unless they have been converted to QuickTime format. For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: NOTE: Sounds that are imported into a PowerPoint presentation do not play when they are moved between platforms. To play the sounds, you must re-import them into your presentation.

Also, if you open your presentation in a version of PowerPoint earlier than 98 or an earlier version of PowerPoint Viewer, the sounds do not play across multiple slides.

To play sounds or music across multiple slides within PowerPoint, follow these steps:

1. Open your presentation.
2. On the Insert menu, point to Movies And Sounds, and then click Sound From Gallery, Sound From File, Play CD Audio Track, or Record Sound.
3. After you insert the media (sound), select the media object, and then click Custom Animation on the Slide Show menu,.
4. In the Custom Animation dialog box, click the Timing tab, and make sure that the media object is selected.
5. Click the Play Settings tab. Click to select the Play Using Animation Order check box. After you make this selection, some additional options become available.
6. By default, the Pause Slide Show option is selected. This setting allows the presentation to stop until the sound has finished playing or until the next slide is advanced. To play across multiple slides, select the Continue Slide Show option. After you make this selection, options for Stop Playing become available.
7. The default for the options under Stop Playing is normally After Current Slide, which corresponds with the action for Pause Slide Show under While Playing. To be able to play the media object across multiple slides, you must select the After (Slide Number) Slides option. This setting determines when to stop the media object from playing when in a slide show. You also should select the Hide While Not Playing check box.

You can only play sounds across multiple slides in a presentation by using the Movies And Sounds command on the Insert menu. If you try to use the media player or Movie Player on the Macintosh, you can insert a sound, but you cannot play it across multiple slides.