Personally I found Camtasia the easiest to use, but it’s not without it’s limits.

there are all kinds of free wav file sites out there. Often if you just google a particular sound with .wav extension you’ll find a site that hosts it. However, now istockphoto.com offers very affordable audio sounds at a good quality.

If however you want to edit your own sounds there are a variety of software programs available on both mac and windows. I am a mac guy personally so I use Garageband because it came free with my mac and after a little bit of tinkering it’s very easy to use. If you go to http://www.download.com you can search by operating system, and even refine your search for Freeware. Just do a search on “wav editor” and there are plenty of choices to experiment with. Once you have got your program, and a few sound files to experiment with, the rest is just down to some creativity and patience.

Good luck! :O)

Thank you for the great demos on adding sound to presentations. I am new at saving sound files. When you say you use a wave file, where do you find the sounds and how do you save them as a wave file? Need special software?

Appreciate all your great work.

Susan

I agree that is a more common experience. Dealing with an AV team at an event hall can often be daunting and frustrating. But I don’t think that’s a good enough excuse to deny your audience your brilliant ideas at the full experience you can offer them. More often then not, AV teams like any vendor just require some advance notice and preparation. Find out who your point of contact is at the event, make them aware of your needs, and ask them if there are any special instructions they can offer you to prepare for the event.

Being a designer, and previously an AV guy for live events, it was more common that a presenter would show up hours before their talk and would say “Oh yeah, my presentation has sound so what do I need to do?” Taking presentation quality to the next level means respecting the craft and really investing in full preparation for the experience.

It’s true that presenters like Steve Jobs don’t have an orchestra, but he also doesn’t have a lift crane and that worked for Al Gore! It really depends on content, and context. I love Steve Jobs as much as the next guy but I don’t wear black turtle neck sweaters…you get my point. :O)

Movies were once silent, and presentations never had animation in the past. It’s all changing, and it’s getting better. Radio DJs talk over subtle sound audio, same with the news, and most broadcast media. Yahoo has their audio speech mark, and there are countless examples around us everyday. I feel like it’s the next evolution, using this extra dimension, and I’m here to help anyone with accomplishing that goal for sure. It mixes all of my passions, and I bet with some support we can help a lot of presenters accomplish more cinematic and engaging presentations for their individual message.

And music during QA = Genius! Or maybe some gameshow sounds…wah wah waaaaah!

Speaking of sound, my newborn is crying…good night everyone!

And what’s the difference between a presentation with audio and a movie? I wonder if such background noise will distract from the person presenting. I mean, Steve Jobs doesn’t go up on stage with an orchestra, even if he’s in a fancy hall. Instead he does the visual presentation (with a rock-star song intro) and saves the music to the end, as entertainment after the presentation.

Perhaps music during questions would be appropriate. ;-)

@Arnold: It’s called Screenflow for Macintosh

@Maryanne: That’s great, and because it’s all individual elements the ability to edit and adapt makes it a very strong training tool. I can just imagine how exciting the audio playing over the aerial view must have been. Someone really had their thinking cap on with that one. How did that compare to other training presentations you’ve sat through before? Did you feel you were more engaged because it was peaking more then just the visual senses?