There are many ways to add common sound effects and background music to your PowerPoint videos. But what if you wanted audio from an online source like YouTube? You can copy from online to an audio file, save it to your computer then link into a slide deck.
There are many tools to ‘rip’ a video with audio from YouTube that’s against the YouTube terms and conditions but that hasn’t stopped a thriving industry of tools.
Or just save the audio to an MP3, MP4 or other audio format. That’s useful for songs and sound effects.
YouTube is a surprisingly useful source of older, obscure or ‘one hit wonder’ songs, the video element is sometimes just a single image of the artist or album cover.
Online tools
Paste the YouTube link into one of these sites and it’ll do the job for you. Great for short videos, say under 10 minutes.
Software
Or download a tool like aTube Catcher to do the whole job on your computer.
Any Video Converter
Any Video Converter has handled pretty much any format we’ve thrown at it and it’ll also grab video or audio from many online sources, including YouTube.
Finally a mention of Any Video Converter which we’ve used for many years to grab and convert media files. Available for Windows and Mac. You would not buy the software for a few conversions but it’s well worthwhile if you need it regularly.
After Downloading…
Once the download has completed, we suggest testing the audio by opening in a media player like the ever-dependable VLC.
If you’re happy with the file, you can then Insert | Audio | Audio on my PC to attach the audio file to your PowerPoint slide.
From there your audio file is all good to go, ready to be played in your PowerPoint.
Play audio only when clicked on a PowerPoint slide
Add opening and closing music for a PowerPoint presentation
Common Sound effects for PowerPoint
