Control music playback in Keynote presentations

Aug 25, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: s.chrisotph

While audio features are still lacking in Keynote, there is something that makes it better (at least in Keynote '08 and Keynote '09). When you drag an audio file onto a slide, Keynote gives you a little speaker icon to let you know there's something there that makes a noise or two. Well, make that little speaker 135px or bigger on that slide and start your presentation. You, of course, can't actually see the speaker, but know the general area of where you plopped it down. Now drag your mouse over that invisible speaker, and something appears. You'll see a little gray bar on the bottom of the speaker icon's area, with a pause button and a time scroller (the circle that goes across the bar with time, like in iTunes).

Make the speaker icon even bigger, and more controls appear. At 400px and up, everything is shown. You can (from left to right) start the song over, rewind, pause/play, fast forward, go to the end of the song, adjust the time with the scrubber, see the time elapsed, and adjust the volume. I use this a lot with the presentations of music for friends at parties -- I put the song over the album art. It's handy if you want to play a song, and just put it over the album art (make it as wide as the album and line up the bottom of the audio with the album art) and you've got a good looking controller.

Also, if you want to put it along the bottom (or any edge), turn off the constrained proportions in the inspector, and make it at least 400px wide by 45px tall (if you just want the pause and time bar, keep it at 36ox tall). This is very useful for parties, or if you want to have more freedom over audio control while presenting.

[robg adds: I created the image above to show the various controls; click it for a much larger version. Best as I can tell, this isn't documented anywhere in Keynote's manual. The original hint also specified 600px in width, but in my testing, anything 400px or larger shows the exact same set of controls.]

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