Yesterday, I asked if anyone knew of Flash-like software that could be used to create a slide show with music or audio attached. I got some really good suggestions and had a look at each one of them. As Earl correctly pointed out, there are some free pieces of software already included with the Mac Book Pro. I took a swing at IMovie and, while it did what I wanted, I still wanted something a little different, something specifically for doing this type of thing.
I downloaded Adobe’s trial version of Flash and was a bit overwhelmed at how much you had to go through to put together a small presentation. Certainly, it is powerful and full featured, but it was way more than I wanted to deal with and, at $699, much more than I was willing to pay. After reading a tutorial on Flash, at the very end it had a statement: Because so many people wanted to know how to do a slide presentation using Flash, we did it, but we prefer to use Soundslides. To quote their website:
Ridiculously simple storytelling
Soundslides allows storytellers to concentrate on the story, rather than the application. Created for journalists and other storytellers on deadline, Soundslides is designed to make quick work of slide show production.
So, taking them at their word, I downloaded the demo version. They’re right! It is very, very easy to put together a slide show complete with music or audio. Very easy! And, the price is right! $69.95 for the “Pro” version. I will be making a purchase today!
All told, it took me several hours to put together this one minute slide show and that is not because of Soundslides. I didn’t have what I needed to do things properly. I had the photos and an idea; however, I didn’t have any music, so I spent a bit of time searching for some that I could use. I ended up here, listened to quite a bit of really good music, and selected this piece: Mark Koch Trio – Falling Down.
One of the ‘constraints’, if you can call it that, of the Soundslides is that it make the slide show the exact length of the music. Well, the song that I selected was about 5:37 long, so I needed something to edit the MP3. I searched and found Audacity, an open-source sound editor. This allowed me to edit the music down to 1:12 and include a fade at the end. Audacity had a dependency on another library called LAME. LAME is an open-source MP3 encoder. You only need this if you intend to save as MP3. After I got all of that stuff, I was ready to go.
I imported my pictures into the project, ordered them (drag and drop), added the sound track, and then adjusted the sliders to correspond to certain parts of the music where I wanted my photos to transition. That’s about it. I exported the files, uploaded them to the web server, and used Soundslides embed tool to generate the HTML needed to show this inside of the blog. For those of you who are non-technical, I’m sure that this sounds like a lot, but it’s not so bad. 
Assuming that I have an idea and some music, the next one that I put together should be pretty easy! It’s worth a look and at 10% of the price of Flash, it’s quite a bargain. It does only one thing and that’s put together these types of presentations. That’s all that I need. I’ll keep the other $630 in my pocket! Thank you very much!
It’s great to have another creative outlet!
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14 Responses to “Soundslides”
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Fotomagico is what I use. It’s excellent.
After I suggested Fotomagico in your previous post, I knew there was another app there that was promising, but I forgot the name! Soundslides is what I was thinking of. It’ll be good to hear of your experiences.
I like this. I like it a lot. And your music choice turned out perfectly. Once I get a new computer I’ll have to get into this. Thanks for sharing Paul.
@Cedric: Thanks! It was fun to put together. I have some other ideas but need to work on getting the shots and putting in the audio.
Paul,
Excellent! I love the jazz with the Chareslton shots–I’ve never been there, but I’m sure it was a perfect match for those who have. I looked into this before and have a copy of Flash (educational discount), but, like you said, a bit too complicated to have to deal with. What I’d like to do is have some voice recorded stuff with some pictures. I’ve used Audacity for a couple of years (excellent stuff). Did Soundslides have any compatibility issues with your WordPress site, or did you just have to upload and go?
-scott c
@Scott: Soundslides was a breeze. There were no compatibility issues at all. After I went to their website to generate the embed tag, I just copied it and put it into my blog and that was it. Of course, I had to upload the exported files up to my host, but that was it. You could do voice recorded stuff as long as you save it as MP3. No problem. I’d suggest downloading it and giving it a try. 30 days for free! I’m sure that you’ll like its ease of use MUCH better than Flash!
As one of the non-technical types, figuring out all this would have taken me several days at least, maybe weeks. Forget hours. Very impressive. I look forward to seeing more.
Very, very well done Paul. I sincerely hope you continue down this road. I enjoy this and also brought back some vision of my trip as well.
FYI:
http://frederickvan.com/blog/2009/08/jim-heid-author-the-macintosh-ilife-09/
Nicely done. I will have to look into this sometime…soonish.
[...] I’ve long been mesmerized by the combination of still photography and music. It just seems to me to be such a natural fit. I’m not alone in this view, of course. Countless others apparently feel the same way; it’s not hard to find examples of this marriage of media types across the internet. Paul Lester did one recently – you can find it here. [...]
I like the photo show a lot. The music goes with it well. Two questions: How do you get Soundslides to pan across the still photo like that? I can’t find that function. And, regarding the music, is this free to use, or just to download? Thanks.
Hi, Linda. You can find the pan under Slide Info->Movement. You just tell it how large/small you want to start it and where to end it. Also, the music was free and came from a free site. Just click the link noted in the post.
Thanks so much, Paul. I’ll check out the pan info.
What I mean about the music, is, just because you download it free, does that also mean it’s fair use to use it in this manner? I’m unclear on the legality.