This article describes how to create slide shows with PowerPoint on Win 11 with audio tracks associated
with some or all of the slides with the intention of deployment as either a PowerPoint slide show or
as an industry standard mp4 video file (exported from PowerPoint).
As a musician, I record a lot of music with various artists and like to compile digital
slide show "albums" (digital EPs, LPs or EPs) with each slide displaying the song information for that track
and with each song audio track attached to the corresponding slide.
This article focuses on slide shows which play automatically. PowerPoint slide shows can be exported to standard
MP4 video files of high quality with the embedded music. Unfortunately navigation markers between slides aren't included in exporting to MP4.
However, once exported, MP4 "chapter/slide" markers can be manually added as shown below using Drax.
The timing of each slide in the PowerPoint design should be:
if the current slide has no attached audio file, the timing specified in the PowerPoint settings will determine
how long the slide displays before moving automatically to the next slide
if the current slide has an attached audio file, that slide should show for exactly the duration of that audio file.
The audio file should start playing automatically and when finished playing, the slide should move automatically to the
next slide in the slide-show.
The slide show example here was created using:
PowerPoint Version 2401 Build 17231.20194 (Microsoft Office Professional 2021) Win11 Home.
Build The Slide Show with Pictures and Audio tracks
The specific example below demonstrates a 7 track "EP" slide show. There are 8 slides: an intro slide (no audio attached)
which shows for 10 sec followed by 7 slides, each with a different attached audio track.
Create a new slide show and add a new photo album and use the file selection dialog to find and add all slide-photos simultaneously:
Add the slide images to the photo album from local storage (png or jpg):
Open the Transitions ribbon and in the Timing/Advance Slide section, set default "After" to what is appropriate for slides WITHOUT attached audio (10 sec in this example).
This time for slides without audio attached can be individually adjusted per slide or apply to all can be used.
This setting evidently (not obvious) does NOT affect slides which have an audio file attached.
In this example, only the first slide is without an attached audio so the 10 sec setting ONLY applies to that slide.
Open the Slide Show ribbon and make sure the Use Timings is enabled (even though the only slide that uses the
10 sec slide advance setting is the first slide. Evidently (but not obviously) it must be enabled to allow the automatic start
and playing of the slides with audio attached.
Add the audio to each of the corresponding slides using the Insert/Media menu choice (at top far right).
For the example here, I use the original uncompressed 16bit/44.1kHz wav files from the recordings
but mp3 or other supported formats can be used. Since a PowerPoint slide show is basically a zip container with images, audio, xml and code for navigation, the original image and audio files are stored in the PowerPoint file so the file size will be substantially larger
depending on the format of the audio file used. The 7 wav files used in this example use ~ 200MB of storage in the ppt file whereas mp3 audio
files with the maximum quality of 320kbps would use ~ 50MB of storage in the ppt file.
When the audio is added to the slide, the Playback setting will appear in the top taskbar at right.
In the "Audio Options" drop down, choose "Start Automatically" and make sure the "Play Across Slides" is disabled.
These settings must be manually entered for each slide with audio (there is no Apply To All for this audio config.).
"Hide During Show" should be enabled.
Test the slide show to ensure the transitions are automatic and the slides with audio play the audio automatically
and for the full duration of the audio track. Ensure the slides without audio attached use the specified time value in Timing/After.
Export as MP4 video
In the Export/Create a Video menu, I select the Full HD 1080p quality (1920x1080 resolution) for sharp display of the slide graphics.
The settings in PowerPoint video export generate high quality AAC audio encoding with a sample rate of 255kbps,
comparable to the highest 320kbps quality available in mp3 encoded audio:
The size of the mp4 video file created will be larger than the PowerPoint slide show file because the images are being encoded into
an mp4 video format simply to display the static slide images.
For this example with 8 slides with 7 wav audio files attached, the mp4 file length is 21.5 mins with a file size of 406 MB.
The medium quality HD (720p) video export produces an mp4 file size of 230 MB with the same AAC audio sample rate of 255kbps with somewhat softer graphics but certainly adequate for static slides. The free application Drax was then used to generate chapter markers in the MP4 video file to facilitate easy navigation between slides in players that support chapters. The example
below includes 8 chapters (an intro index slide and 7 song slides). Access to the chapters navigation menu for web browsers
that support it is through the vertical ellipsis (⋮) at the bottom right of the video window:
However, as of 2/2024, browser/player video support for
mp4 chapters isn't widespread. Some Apple iPad and iPhone versions support mp4 chapters in the default Safari web browser. Mp4 chapters
are not supported in Win10 or Win11 default Edge web browser. Recent Android smartphones (S23 Ultra) don't support mp4 chapters in
the default Samsung Internet web browser. However, the VLC application on all of Windows, Mac and Android appears to support mp4 chapters
very well with screen shots below showing chapters navigation menus for iPad 6th Gen (left) and VLC on Win11 (right):
