There are two ways of using sound in your Prezi. You can have looping background music, or you can have sounds that just play once at certain path points in your Prezi, which is called voice-over. There are obvious benefits to using both of these different options, whether your Prezi is being shown online or in front of a live audience. By teaching you these techniques, it's our hope that you'll be able to come up with some really creative uses for sound that really take your Prezi skills to the next level.
Obviously, if you're delivering to a live audience and want background music, you can just use your laptop or another audio device separated from your Prezi. That will save you the time and effort of trying to build it into your Prezi file, and in business, time is money. But what happens after the live presentation when people ask you, "Can we have the presentation to review?"
Wouldn't it be great to give them exactly the same experience they had in the live session and to use the same music, or at least some background music, to help set the mood for your presentation?
Your average Prezi user would probably pass on this to save time. But a Prezi Master would make their Prezi as memorable as possible, especially if it's being viewed without them.
Here's how to insert the background music:
- Click on Insert and then Add Background Music…:
- Select the file you would like to use and click on Open.
- The file will begin uploading and you should see a progress bar:
- Once the upload is complete, you can click the play button to preview it, the trash button to delete it, or the Done button to finish the process:
- Once you're done, you'll see the name of the background music track appear at the top of your path steps on the left.
- If you decide to use something different for the background music, you'll notice the Insert menu has changed to read Replace Background Music…; selecting this will allow you to upload a new track that replaces the last one, as shown in the following screenshot:
Adding a voice-over to any particular path point follows a process similar to that of adding background music, but it's based on each step in the path:
- Click the point in the path on the left-hand side of your screen where you want to add the voice-over.
- From the Insert menu, select Add Voice-over to Path Step #2.... You should see the path number that you've selected appear next to the number sign on the menu:
- Wait for the upload to complete:
- Once complete, you can preview the audio or delete it:
- Finally, if you have uploaded the voice-over for the wrong path point, or simply want to make a change, you can right-click on the path thumbnail and select Replace Voice-over on Path Step:
Once you've added the proper audio, Prezi does a great job of automating the playback process for you. Once you're in presentation mode, the background music starts to play automatically. As soon as you navigate to a path point that has a voice-over associated with it, that voice-over will also play automatically.
Once you've added audio to your Prezi, you'll see two new buttons in the bottom-left corner of your presentation mode screen. The play button allows the Prezi to automatically advance through the path voice-overs.
While you are in presentation mode, you can always click the pause button in the bottom-left corner of the screen in order to pause the background music, or you can mute it with the speaker button, as shown in the following screenshot:
