Cue and trigger audio along with Keynote presentation

Sep 24, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Baby Bloc

I want to control a Keynote slideshow, clicking whenever I'm done with a slide to go to the next one. I want music tracks to play over several slides, then fade out and have another track come up for the next slides. Keynote doesn't do this, pity (feel free to let them know this would be good). I've got my Keynote slideshow (or I will, now that I've figured this out), so what about the music?

I put my music in order in an iTunes playlist. Then I checked the "Allow Exposé, Dashboard and others to use screen" checkbox on the Slideshow tab of Keynote's preferences. This allows the iTunes playlist to be controlled with hotkeys during the show, advancing the music whenever I want to move to the next song during my slideshow. I have to hit two buttons (one for the slides, one for the song), and it would be much easier if Keynote would just do it, but I think this will work for me.

Finally, I installed an AppleScript that fades an iTunes track and starts the next one, so that's a nicer transition; good enough for now. I had to use Quicksilver to assign the hot key, though, because Apple's System Preference hot key assigner wouldn't recognize it. (I may have to edit the script to eliminate its onscreen growl notification, but I don't think it's showing up over the presentation, so whatever.)

Hope that helps. I got inspiration from these threads: Is Keynote a dead loss when it comes to music?, Can Mainstage 2 drive Apple Keynote, or other video/slides?, and How come Keynote can't control two sound files?.

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