PPT2000: Only the First Sound Plays on Slide with Multiple Sound Objects

If you have two or more sounds on a slide in your presentation and both have a timing interval of zero seconds, you may notice that only the first sound will play when you view the slide in Slide Show.

The narration feature of PowerPoint has been improved so that it synchronizes more smoothly with build effects. For this to work properly, animation timings must be measured from the start of the previous animation to the start of the next animation.

This is a change in the way earlier versions of PowerPoint handled timing events. Earlier versions of PowerPoint measure time between the end of an animation to the start of the next animation.

Because of this, the sounds files all try to play at the same time. Only the first sound set to play in the animation order will play, the others will be suppressed.

Set Animation Timings

To work around this problem, you will have to set a specific play time for each sound you want to play. To do this, follow these steps:

1. On the Slide Show menu, click Custom Animation.
2. Click the Order & Timing tab.
3. Click to select the first sound object in the Animation order list.
4. Click the Multimedia Settings tab.
5. Click More Options.
6. From the Sound Options dialog box, take note of the Total playing time for the sound clip.
7. Click Cancel.
8. Click the Order & Timing tab.
9. Click to select the next sound in the Animation order list.
10. Set the timing for this sound to the total playing time of the previous clip (noted in step 6) plus one second.
    
    This extra second is to allow the sound device to be released and to start playing the next sound.
11. Repeat steps four to ten for each sound object on your slide.
12. Click OK.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.