In a recent post I mentioned about embedding audio into a PowerPoint presentation which you wanted to share or distribute (say on a VLE).

This is proving to be quite a popular post, but I did think that some people may be looking at it on how to add audio to a presentation in the first place.

You can add audio clips to a presentation or record audio for use in the presentation. You can even play a track from a CD, though you will not be able to embed a CD audio track.

To add audio to a PowerPoint presentation (this is using PowerPoint 2003) from the menu.

Insert > Movies and Sounds > Sound from File…

Once you have added some audio files, say an audio track or a recording from the British Library Archival Sound Recordings collection you may find when you upload the presentation to a website or your VLE that the audio files are now “missing”.

This is because PowerPoint has an option that for files bigger than a certain size it will link to them rather than embed them. This is fine if you play the presentation from your laptop or computer, but rather annoying for a learner who has downloaded the presentation from the VLE and is attempting to play the presentation at home.

In PowerPoint 2003

Tools > Options > General Tab

Link sounds with file size greater than <insert a number which is larger than the size of the audio files being used>

I tested this on our Moodle VLE and it worked a treat. I would guess that later and earlier versions of PowerPoint have a similar option.