Soundslides Slide Shows

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By Jeremy Rue, Scot Hacker

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)

It can be purchased and downloaded at http://www.soundslides.com

(Note for UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students: A liscensed version of Soundslides 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 :

  • Standard player appearance that is only slightly customizable
  • Very few branding options. Most Soundslides presentations look the same.*
  • Runs a dynamic slide show from a folder of files, so it only works on the Web**
  • No built-in way to export slide show to a single video file***

* Recent versions added branding options.
** This means it is generally not easily sent by e-mail, burned to a DVD, or used for other presentation purposes.
*** Quicktime export plug-in now available for an extra cost here.

Note: This tutorial covers the basic version of Soundslides, not the Pro version. 

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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.

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