Soundslides

By Jeremy Rue
Published Nov 7, 2007 in Audio, Photography, Web Design, Flash

Introduction

Soundslides desktop application

Soundslides is a slide show authoring program that was created by former photojournalist Joe Weiss in 2005. The application took the journalism industry by storm and quickly rose to become an industry standard for audio slide show authoring.

Soundslides is a desktop application, which means you have to download it on to your computer. It's available for both Mac and PC and comes in two versions: a basic version which runs $39.95 and a pro version that costs $69.95. (November 2007). Also, a plug-in to export your slideshow as a Quicktime movie is now available for an extra cost here. (Mac OSX only)

The trial and full versions of SoundSlides can be purchased and downloaded at http://www.soundslides.com

(Note for UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students: A liscensed version of Soundslides Plus is installed on all the computers in J-School newsrooms.)

Some of the benefits of Soundslides include:

  • An incredibly simple-to-use interface
  • Very small learning curve, most of it is drag-and-drop
  • Outputs files in Adobe Flash format, a very common Web format that works cross platform
  • It was built for journalists

Some of the drawbacks of Soundslides :

  • No video integration
  • Runs a dynamic slide show from a folder of files, so it only works on the Web*


* This means it is generally not easily sent by e-mail, burned to a DVD, or used for other presentation purposes.

 

Comments

1) Milena Vodanovic, March 20, 2008 at 3:08 p.m. [Link]

Could you tell me about an equivalent application in mac? Maybe I'm making a stupid question, but I just bought my first mac and have not jet explored all its facilities.
my mail: mvodanovic@paula.cl

2) Scot Hacker, April 22, 2008 at 11:34 a.m. [Link]

Hi Milena - SoundSlides has always been a Mac application! It only later became available for Windows as well.

3) Greg Harman, November 30, 2008 at 7:36 p.m. [Link]

to use audio clips in my slideshows, i've been relying on imovie. however, before i can get started i have to edit the audio files in another program. usually this means converting the audio format twice before i have it in imovie ready to rumble.

once in imovie, i tend to get myself bogged down timing each image against the transitions. it all feels overly labor intensive considering i'm typically only putting together a five-minute segment.

needless to say, i'm anxious to explore other software offerings out there. maybe this is the ticket. thanks!

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