Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations: Engage your audience visually with stunning Prezi presentation designs and be the envy of your colleagues who use PowerPoint with this book and ebook.

Apart from the reasons mentioned previously, your Prezi will really benefit from having sound if you decide to embed it into a website or share it on the Prezi explore page (http://prezi.com/explore/). There's more detail on this in Chapter 6, Prezis for Online Delivery, but making Prezi files that people can explore on their own is a huge benefit to people that might not have had the time to be at your live presentation. Adding sound into these online Prezis will help the users exploring them understand the content quicker and with more clarity.

You might decide to have audio recorded from your live session and have it played at certain points in your Prezi. Or you might just want to create some kind of mood for the user that fits with your Prezis message. For the latter, you can use a music track that loops continuously when your Prezi is viewed online.

A great example of sound being used to its full potential in Prezi can be seen on the Prezi Explore page at http...

Like any piece of software, there are lots of clever little things happening beneath the surface that we don't see. When you use the Image option on the web and the Google images appear, that's because some lovely person at Prezi wrote some clever coding to make it all happen.

It's these clever little bits of code that mean you can insert shapes, images, frames, movies, drawings, and so on. But where's the insert audio button? Surely the developers at Prezi have thought of that haven't they?

Well actually, no, they haven't. Not yet anyway. At this moment, Prezi is still in its infancy and changing all the time. One thing the Prezi team is great at is listening to their users and introducing new features based on what users want. At this moment in time, there is no insert audio button in Prezi, but it doesn't mean that will be the case forever, and if you really want audio there are ways to add it. Otherwise what would be the point in this chapter!

As you hopefully know by now, Prezi can handle video files (refer the Chapter 3, Inserting a Video) and it's this video feature that your audio can piggyback a ride on to end up inside your Prezi file.

The following screenshot should give you a basic understanding of how this is done:

Until inserting audio becomes part of the Prezi software, (fingers crossed it'll be soon) you will have to convert your audio files into video format to use them on your Prezi canvas.

What this means is that the techniques explained in the rest of this chapter are really just a workaround to trick Prezi into thinking you're using video, which technically you will be. It'll all become clear throughout the chapter, and trust us; it will definitely set your Prezis apart from the rest of the crowd and get you to Prezi Master Status.

There are two different routes you can take to use audio in Prezi, so we'll explore them both in detail here and hopefully your Prezis will be making lots of noise...

Knowing where to find great sounds from will save you lots of time, and just like with imagery there are some great online libraries to choose from:

Each of these online libraries offers thousands of sound effects and music tracks at very low prices. They all have very easy-to-use search facilities, and for those of you who are aspiring to become a Prezi DJ you can use Audio Networks beats per minute calculator in your search to help you find really fast-paced tracks, or relaxing slow tracks.

Of course you can also search for sound effects and music tracks that are free to download. In some instances, this will take a little longer, but ultimately means that you and your company aren't spending a penny and achieving some great results.

Here's the best of the free audio libraries:

There are two ways of using sound in your Prezi. You can have looping background music, or you can have sounds that just play once at certain path points in your Prezi. There are obvious benefits to using both of these different options whether your Prezi is being showed online or in front of a live audience. By teaching you these techniques, it's our hope that you'll be able to come up with some really creative uses for sound that really take your Prezi skills to the next level.

Hopefully by this stage you have a great understanding of how to get sound into your Prezi, and of course what the limitations on the software might be. But how is this going to make your presentations better and more memorable? A few ways that sound can be used in your Prezi are discussed in this chapter.

It's at this point we hope you're now itching to take what you've learned and find excuses to build it into your next Prezi.

As we mentioned at the very start of the chapter, inserting sound into Prezi is not yet a feature of the software. Because of this the vast majority of users don't include sound into their Prezis.

By using the techniques in this chapter, you can help achieve two things:

The knock on effect of the second point is that when many users together want to insert sound the chances are that Prezi will do their very best to make sure it gets built into the software.

For now though you can enjoy basking in the glory of your incredible sounding Prezis.

In the following chapter, it's time to take a look at how video can really make your Prezis shine and make them even more memorable.

If a picture says a thousand words, then moving pictures with sounds must speak in volumes.