Importing multiple audio files to simplify production workflow

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:56:58 GMT

Maybe folks already figured this out, but I just happened to discover this recently and thought I'd share w/ the group.

Ever have to deal with this scenario?

You have a 20, 30 or 80 slide deck (okay, maybe that's a bit extreme!), and now it's time to add all your narrative audio to the deck. Normally not a big deal, but with larger projects, it gets to be extremely tedious to have to select a slide in the Import Audio panel and then select the audio file you want assigned to that slide.

What if there was a way to select MULTIPLE audio files and import them all at one time!

Well....you CAN! And here's how:

Open the Import Audio dialog box using Presenter's menu in PowerPoint. Select your first slide listed in the panel and then click on the BROWSE button. Once you find the audio files that you'll use for your course, all you have to do is select them all! As soon as you click "okay" or "open", the net result will be that your files will all appear in the Import Audio dialog box in sequential order.

Okay, so it'll work, but let's talk about a couple of caveats, shall we?

First, it should be obvious that the naming convention of your audio files is

EXTREMELY important. For most projects, the naming convention that I use looks like this:

clientName_projectName_slide#_.wav or put another way: rc_devPlan_slide31.wav

It doesn't matter if you use 01.wav, 02.wav, 03.wav or slide01.wav, slide02.wav, ect.

Just be consistent!

Second, if you have question slides peppered throughout your deck, you may not want (or need) audio for question slides. So how do you import multiple audio files for slides that are scattered in a deck?

Easy: just select the starting slide that you want to import audio and select the audio you need for that set....then select the next slide (in a series of slides) that you need to import audio for, and select as many wav or mp3 files you need to import in the next batch.

To help make this a bit easier, I just recorded a screencast that outlines the process, and you can see the video at

http://screenr.com/QmU

Enjoy!

Rob

http://www.robrode.com/yabb/

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Importing multiple audio files to simplify production workflow