Sound in PowerPoint slow the first time it's run

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Wires001

I have a PowerPoint 2007 file which includes a number of mp3 sound
files that run in the background when a slide loads. The presentation
has been run on multiple computers with no problem but today we took
it to a conference and tested it on a different laptop and the first
time it was run, all of the sound files took a minute or two to load.
The slide where the sound is supposed to run in the background hangs
and the show is locked up until the sound plays. After I run through
the whole presentation and then back it up to the beginning,
everything works fine and runs at normal speed with sounds loading
immediately. But if I exit presentation mode, I have to start over
caching the sound files again.

Is there a setting in PowerPoint 2007 that needs to be changed to
prevent this from happening?
 
Sadly, sound in PowerPoint is among its most horribly-handled misfeature. I have a
sort-of-synchronized sound-and-slide presentation which has to be pre-run or it won't stay
in sync. And the way the name of the sound file is handled is a mark of some of the most
amateurish mis-design in the history of programming. (It wouldn't be so bad if this bug
had appeared in the first version that supported sound, and had immediately been fixed,
but it has been propagated through all versions of PowerPoint!)

Laptops are among the worst platforms because they usually have slow, small disks and
small amounts of memory. I'm surprised you would not have reported the actual memory
available, since this is really important information; instead you just give some
meaningless description like "a different laptop" as if we are supposed to magically
intuit something meaningful from that description. Now, if you said:

"Running it on an XYZ model 350 laptop, under Windows XP, a 36GB disk (33GB of which are
in use) and 512MB of main memory" and compared that to a successful platform, and included
the size of the sound file and the size of the presentation file, I might be tempted to
suggest that perhaps your main memory was too small, or your disk too slow, or your disk
badly fragmented, but seriously, what can you expect us to make of "a different laptop" in
terms of constructive analysis?
joe

I have a PowerPoint 2007 file which includes a number of mp3 sound
files that run in the background when a slide loads. The presentation
has been run on multiple computers with no problem but today we took
it to a conference and tested it on a different laptop and the first
time it was run, all of the sound files took a minute or two to load.
The slide where the sound is supposed to run in the background hangs
and the show is locked up until the sound plays. After I run through
the whole presentation and then back it up to the beginning,
everything works fine and runs at normal speed with sounds loading
immediately. But if I exit presentation mode, I have to start over
caching the sound files again.

Is there a setting in PowerPoint 2007 that needs to be changed to
prevent this from happening?
Click to expand...
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: (e-mail address removed)
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
 
Thanks for your reply. To answer your questions, I do not know the
specs on the laptop other than it was a couple years old and ran
Windows Vista. I arrived at a conference and had 30 minutes to test
out the presentation on the equipment provided by another party so I
have no way of finding out at this point. When I posted the message I
was hoping that someone knowledgeable about the nuances of PowerPoint
2007 might be able to reply with a setting change in the software that
needed to be made. My concern is that this will happen again
someplace else when using someone else's equipment. I suspect that it
doesn't have anything to do with the hardware specs.
 
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