I'm having problems with selected sound files playing in powerpoi.

[Ken K.]

I'm having problem in preparing a powerpoint presentation with sound. When I
insert some sound files (ripped from a CD), it plays just as I want. But
when I insert others (from the same CD!), it will not play. It inserts
properly and looks like all is OK but when it is supposed to play, no sound
results. As I said, other sound tracks insert fine. Also, when I use the
Microsoft Media player to play the "problem" tracks, they play just fine. So
I don't think there is a problem with the sound file - its something with
PowerPoint or the way I'm using PowerPoint.

Any help woul be greatly appreciated.

 

[Sonia]

One reason might be the length of the path to the sound file. If the path
exceeds 128 characters, PowerPoint is unable to play/locate them. Are they
located in a sub-folder of My Documents? Try moving them to C:\Test, for
example, and then delete and re-insert them. Does that help?
--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

 

[Ken K.]

That was the problem - thank you so much. When I moved everything to the C
drive it worked like a champ. I couldn't find anywhere that there was a
character limit on the path but I guess there is.

Thankl you again.

 

[Paul N]

Can you put this in the Powerpoint help documentation? I've wasted hours and
hours trying to make this work. This 128 character path limit is not in any
of the current documentation and is very, very important. Please lobby to get
it into the Office Assistant articles on inserting sounds.

 

[Echo S]

Hi, Paul,

I believe this will be in the Help for Office 12, Paul. (I'll forward your
post to one of the PPT Help writers to make sure it's on the list.) It
*might* be in some of the Office Online stuff you'd get from the PPT 2003
Help, and there's a KB article we were able to get added last year also.

The problem with the KB article especially is you almost have to know what's
going wrong before the search terms you type in will pull up that article!
It's frustrating, I know.