Hear and Now (May 19, 2008)

Sounds are often overlooked as a great way to reinforce your point. That’s because we often think about the projector (or whatever you use to enlarge your visuals), as a more sexy presentation tool than the sound system (or whatever you use to enlarge your music, effects, and sound stories).

National Public Radio does a great job using sound to tell a story. After all, they are radio! You’ll be listening to air hiss out of a pipe and a clanging sound, then some people talking in a language you’ve never spoken, highlighted by clucking chickens. When the narrator says something about the low-wage worker in the outback of Cali, Colombia and his family’s struggle to keep the mill running… you’ve got a vivid picture of the place in your mind.

That’s why we’ve built easy to load and play sound tools into Freepath. When you’re looking at the PowerPoint slide of the galaxy, then show a flash animation of orbital trajectory between here and the moon, how cool to play the famous Apollo 11 “one small step for man…” mp3 that you can download for free from www.freeinfosociety.com.

Oddly, sounds work best in Freepath in the Dual Screen display. That’s because you can DJ your music and effects while your audience is riveted to your smashing projected visuals.

Freepath lets you play music for example, and span it across all your sequence of media. In fact you can also tee up multiple music cues and trigger them one after another, as you need them, without disrupting your visuals. We’ve all tried to jump back and forth between iTunes and PowerPoint to run the sound playlist under the PowerPoint deck. Not fun. Well, you don’t have to anymore. That’s all done in one application, Freepath. Sounds play uninterrupted under all visuals, and if it’s video you’re playing, you can actually mix audio in real time.

You can even drag files from iTunes right into Freepath. The sound controller will run all the music you have in a playlist in a loop until you tell it to stop. The forward and back arrows allow you to override the playback and will move to the next song through a nice dissolve.

So the next time you want to inspire your sales team, drop in the audio of Aragorn’s battle speech from the Return of the King, or create a whole set of playlists in your library with soothing music for the break periods during your training sessions. You probably can’t afford to have an orchestra follow you to speaking engagements. Might as well use what’s free to download, Freepath. (You will, of course pay royalties and give due credit where required for content you play, won’t you…!)

Coming up: Why in the world you’d want to navigate the web with your audience…