Questions by email or in the Presentation Software forum have indicated that sound and music in PowerPoint are hot topics these days -- mainly for problems. Many people discover that the sound or music selection works just fine on their own computer, but when they email the presentation to others, for some reason the music will not play. What is up with that?
PowerPoint sound won't play
© Wendy Russell
The short answer is that the music or sound file was likely linked to the presentation and not embedded into it. PowerPoint cannot find the music or sound file that you linked to in your presentation and therefore no music will play. So, how to you fix this?
Quick Fix for PowerPoint Sound Problems
PowerPoint sound won't play
© Wendy Russell
Quick Fix for PowerPoint Sound Problems
Thanks for the clarification, I now have my sound working on PPT project due after the holidays. Much appreciated.
Glad it worked out for you.
Good solution to the sound problems in PPT.
There is another “dirtier” solution and that is to simply zip the PPT and the linked files into one file. All the receiver has to do is unzip the files to a folder.
Of course there are a couple of drawbacks with zip by email, but you could for example rename the file to a .bin file and let the receiver rename it back to .zip file…
Good idea. However there are a few minor issues with zipping. You did identify one — the renaming of the zip file, (because many email programs strip out the zip files) but many people don’t know how to rename a file. Secondly, if the original linked files were not in the same folder as the presentation when they were linked, this can cause problems. PowerPoint is funny that way.
Thanks for the comment.
I have done all the right things to get music to play in my powerpoint – and have done it before with no problems – i.e. embed a wav file, change the size to 50000kbs, etc etc. But this presentation seems to NOT play the music OR the animated text of the slide (it’s only 1 slide). It was doing the animated text fine until i added the music. Now nothing plays!
jenjen:
My guess is that your WAV file is larger than 50,000 K and therefore cannot be embedded. You could try linking to the WAV file, but just make sure that the WAV file is located in the same folder as the presentation. If you copy the presentation to another computer or location, make sure to also copy the sound file too … in the identical location.