Adding Music to a Digital Story
 

Adding Computer-Generated Music to your Digital Story with Photo Story 3

Photo Story 3 includes prerecorded music of many different styles and genres that you can use to customize for your story. You can add music both from your computer and the Photo Story prerecorded music to your stories. Only one piece of music can play for a selected picture or anchor image.

To add computer-generated music to your story with Photo Story 3

  1. On the Add background music page, click a picture, and then click Create Music.

    create music button

     
  2. In the Create Music dialog box, in the Genre list, click a genre.
     
  3. In the Style list, click a style.
     
  4. In the Bands box, click a band.
     
  5. In Moods list, click a mood.
     
  6. In the Tempo box, move the slider to adjust the tempo.
     
  7. In the Intensity box, click one of the following options: music types

  8. Click Play to hear how the Photo Story prerecorded music sounds.
     
  9. Repeat steps 1 through 8 until you have selected all the music that you want to play with your story.
     
  10. Click Preview to play your story.

    Your entire story plays, starting at the selected picture, complete with the narration, title pages, and any background music you added.
     

  11. If you need to adjust the volume of a piece of background music in your story, select the anchor image, and then move the Volume slider on the Add background music page.

    For example, if you narrated your pictures, you may want to move the slider toward Low to decrease the music volume so your voice can be heard clearly over the background music.
     

  12. Click Next.

    If you want to return to the previous page, click Back.

Notes

 

How Audio was Added to the Gettysburg Address in Photo Story 3

The following information deals with the digitial story version of the Gettysburg Address which may be viewed at: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/movie_social_studies_04.html

When you come to the Add background music screen, you have two choices: to either press select music or create music.

1) In this case, we want to add our own audio file of Lincoln's Gettysburg Adress, so we will press the button that says Select Music. Note that the audio file you want to add may not be a music file -- it may be a speech or other type of audio recording, or like in our Gettysburg Address file, an audio clip that contains both spoken words and music together. But Photo Story 3 calls all external audio files Music so this is the button we will use. (Perhaps it would hav been better for the developers to name that button Select Audio.) When you are ready to add the pre-recorded audio, select the image in the timeline where you want the audio to begin and then click the Select Music button.

 

2)  A window like the one shown below will appear and you will browse to the location where the audio file you want to include is located. When you find it, highlight the audio file and press the Open button. This will insert the audio file into your Photo Story. Make sure in the file type box at the bottom of the window that All Audio Files is selected before you click open so that music files in all audio formats will be displayed.

 

You can now press the preview button to preview your story with the included audio to hear how it sounds.

 

 


Ripping Music from an Audio CD

"Ripping" is the process of copying audio or video information from one medium, such as an audio CD or DVD movie disc, to the hard drive of a computer. The Windows XP operating system has a feature that allows you to easily rip audio tracks (or songs) from a commercial music CD.

When you first insert an audio CD into a PC, a dialogue box usually appears as shown below. One option that should be listed is "Rip music from CD." (You may need to scroll down to find this if many choices are listed in the dialogue box.



Make sure this option is highlighted and click the OK button.

This should launch Windows Media Player (which depending on the version that's installed on your computer may look different than the version displayed here).



You will notice that each track (song) on the CD has a check mark to the left of the name and this indicates that each song will be ripped from the CD automatically. If you only want to rip some of the songs and not all of them, you will need to de-select the check boxes next to the songs you do not want to copy. But you must act fast because the ripping process begins automatically and it doesn't take too long to rip a track.

Once the desired track or tracks are ripped, you will see which tracks have been "Ripped to library" under the column "Rip Status."

Next, you will need to locate the ripped tracks. By default, they should have been saved in the "My Music" folder, which is inside the "My Documents" folder on your computer's hard drive. In this case, if you navigate to that folder, you will see a folder with the name of the artist or the title of the CD from which you ripped the music track.

If you double click to go inside that folder, you should see the tracks that have been ripped, which should have the file extension: .wma - which stands for Windows Media Audio. At this point you can copy the desired file or files to a flash drive, burn them on a data CD, move them out of this folder or copy them to another location, such as the desktop, so that you can more easily find them.

At this point, you may add the song to Photo Story by selecting the image where you want the song to begin playing and then clicking on the Select Music button (on the Add Background Music screen) and navigating to the location where the ripped track is located.

For the more adventurous, you may want to explore the More Options feature under the Rip menu in Windows Media Player, which will give you more control of the ripping process.

For example, you will notice under the "Rip Music" tab, that you are able to change the location of where the ripped tracks will be saved. You will also have the option to change the audio quality of the ripped tracks, depending on your needs and the amount of hard drive space you want to use to store these files.