sync slides to audio

I just started using fotomagico and went through the tutorials. I want to sync 3 songs with 150 slides. I tried to use “Match slide duration to audio” but that didn’t do anything to sync the slides to the music. I also got an error message that not all slides were chosen, yet they are all highlighted. I also tried to manually reduce the slide duration of some slides hoping it would adjust the overall slideshow length but nothing happened. What seems to be a basic and simple thing to do is proving very very difficult for me.

Also how do I normalize the audio for multiple songs? I can’t seem to find a way to do that either.

Can anyone please help? Thanks.

  1. Adjust slide duration to audio: Select the audio in your story board. Adjust the audio length by dragging the left and right edges to the slides that should be shown with this audio. Once your audio spans all the slides you wish to play, select the “Match slide duration to audio” menu item (no need to select the slides!). The duration of all the slides get changed to match the duration of the audio.

  2. Setting the volume of an audio item: Select the audio in the story board. switch to the options-panel on the right side. Here you will find a section “Audio”. Once this is uncollapsed you can change the Volume of this song.

Thanks.

Achim,
I’ve spend over an hour trying to get my slides to match the audio duration. Nothing I’ve tried seems to work. Here are my specifics:

3 songs, 142 slides (but fotomagico has added 6 more slide slots with no slides in them and given me a total count of 148 slides) The music is locked but not linked. I put the slides in first arranged them then dropped the music in (had to remove auto linking)

I select all 3 songs. Select “match…” and nothing happens. As a work around I though that I would just select all the slides and keep adjusting their duration until they reached the end of the music in the storyboard/timeline. That doesn’t work either. The slides change length and the whole program changes length. And the last song appears to start looping automatically (not set to loop). In the mean time I still have the 6 empty slide slots at the end to fill in from my last real slide to the end of the (now incorrectly looped) music.

I’m writing this as I am working so this message keeps getting longer as I collect more info. I toggled looping on and off and now I get a little warning triangle at the end of the last song. It appears to mean that the song has been stretched past it’s natural duration. When I shorten the song to it’s correct length, the triangle goes away. (the warning sign has no explanation anywhere easily found)

As a work around I will probably just play with slide duration and toggle music looping on and off until I get the timing I want. In the mean time you either have a very sever bug or extremely poor design and functionality.

And I’m wondering if I started over and put the music in first. Then added the slides if it would function correctly. I’m afraid to do that because I spent so much time arranging the slides. I’m having save issues too so I’m reluctant to mess around too much.

Steven

@sjmvideo: Can you make the slideshow available to us? E.g. upload it somewhere and send us a link to support(at)boinx.com referring this post so we can have a look at the document. Thanks!

Achim,
Here I think is my problem. I want to select multiple songs and have the slides above them equalize out along all 3 songs. What I got when I tried again today is the slides above each song, equalized for just that song. So slide duration were not consistent across all songs. My work around will be to create the composite single song elsewhere and then equalize across the new single combined audio track. It would be a nice feature, or if it’s in there needs to be explained more clearly. I imagine lots of people have multiple songs that they want to mach up with a fixed number of slides, all slides being the same length and all of the songs included.

@sjmvideo: Now I understand you problem better! Unfortunately there is no way to have a fixed slide duration over multiple songs because the songs always starts and ends on the beginning or end of a slide. If a song have to end in the middle of a slide (because your slideshow is that way) FotoMagico can’t currently (version 3.8.5) do this. Your workaround should work best, because then FotoMagico just sees “one” song and will match all the slides to it. Another solution would be to accept a slightly different slide duration per song, so that you have e.g. 6.1 secs for the slides on the first song and 6.7 secs for the slides on the second song and so forth.