It’s very easy to add a music file to a presentation to create a soundtrack effect with PowerPoint 2007.

This short video explains how to take an MP3 file, insert it into a PowerPoint show, and make it play automatically when the presentation begins.

How To Add Music To A PowerPoint Presentation

This demonstration uses an MP3 file. MP3s provide good compression (i.e smaller file sizes) and are the most popular format for digital music. The technique also works with other formats, like WMA (Windows Media Audio) and WAV (Windows Audio).

Using an MP3 file is much better than trying to run the music off an audio CD. The presentation is easier to set up, loads faster, doesn’t depend of having a CD present, and works well on any machine — as long as the MP3 file always in the same folder as the PowerPoint presentation.

The video show how to use the  settings to Play across slides and Loop until stopped …so the music continues to play until the presentation is finished.

Keep in mind that some music tracks sound better when looped than others — in fact some tracks are designed to be looped seamlessly.

For music and loop tracks (plus audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, etc.) released under a Creative Commons License, check out The Freesound Project or ccMixter.