How to Add and Edit Audio or Music in Google Slides

Do you want your presentation to be more dynamic? If you need to engage your audience by giving a professional presentation, you can add music to your slide deck. We’re going to teach you how to add and configure audio or music for your presentations.

1. Adding Audio from the Insert Tab
2. Editing Audio
3. Adding Online Audio
4. Adding Audio from YouTube

Adding Audio from the Insert Tab

• Before you add any audio, please note that Google Slides only works with audio files stored in your Google Drive account, so you need to upload them beforehand. The supported formats are .mp3 and .wav.
• Open your presentation in Google Slides and select the slide where you want to add audio or music. If you want the audio to be played in all the slides, you’ll need to add it to the first slide.
• Click Insert → Audio. A new window will open. Please note that this option might not be available in some countries where the update that includes it hasn’t been applied yet.

• The audio files stored in your Google Drive will be displayed here. Choose the one you want to add to your presentation and click Select. An icon will appear in the slide. Click it to access the playback functions.

Editing Audio

• Click the audio icon.
• Go to the toolbar and click Format options. As an alternative, you can right-click the loudspeaker icon → Format options. You can also click Format → Format options. A new panel will open on the right side of the screen.

On this panel you’ll find the following settings:

• From the Audio playback tab, you can configure everything regarding the playback. For example, you can determine whether the audio plays on click or automatically. You’ll find below the volume slider and three checkboxes to stop the playback when going to the next slide, loop the audio or hide the audio icon (the latter can only be modified if the “Automatically” option is selected under “Start playing”).

• From the Size & Rotation tab you can modify the width and height values for the audio icon. You can also lock the aspect ratio so that you can keep the proportions of the icon.

• From the Position tab you can determine where to place the audio icon, having its top-left corner or its center point as reference. To move the icon, just modify the values of the X and Y axes.

• From the Recolor tab you can change the color of the icon, choosing from different presets generated according to the palette of your presentation.

• From the Adjustments tab you can set the transparency, the lightness and the contrast of the icon.

• The remaining tabs, Drop shadow and Reflection, contain a checkbox to enable or disable these effects. Click their respective drop-down arrows to access their settings, such as color (only for the drop shadow) and behavior (angle, transparency, distance and blur).

• You can replace the audio icon with your own, or even a picture, by right-clicking → Replace image. If you want to find out how to insert images, please refer to the How to Insert, Crop or Mask Images in Google Slides tutorial.

Adding Online Audio

• Open your presentation in Google Slides and select the slide where you want to add audio.
• Insert an icon or image. We’ll use this resource to link the online audio. Please refer to the How to Add and Modify Icons in Google Slides tutorial if you don’t know how.

• Add the link to the online audio. If you don’t know how to do it, please refer to the How to Add Hyperlinks in Google Slides tutorial.

• Once linked, click the icon. A new window will appear, where you must click the Play button of the online audio from the specified URL. Some audio platforms, such as Soundcloud, allow you to generate an autoplay sharing link. With that, you just need to click the icon to play the audio automatically.
• If you want to pause the playback, you’ll need to exit the presentation mode and do it manually.

Adding Audio from YouTube

• Open your presentation in Google Slides and select the slide where you want to add audio.
• Insert the video that you want for your presentation. Please refer to the How to Add a Video in Google Slides tutorial if you don’t know how.

• Decrease the size of the video and place it outside the visible part of the slide.

• Go to the Video playback options and set the video to autoplay. To do this, right-click the video → Format options. Then, click the Video playback drop-down arrow and check “Autoplay when presenting”. If you want to learn more about this panel, please refer to the How to Add a Video in Google Slides tutorial.

• Please note that the audio will stop when changing slides.