How to Add YouTube Music to Google Slides: Simple Guide

Adding music can do a great deal to round out a presentation and help set the mood, captivate an audience, or make something a little more enjoyable. If you’re working on preparing a slideshow on Google Slides, and you want to give it a little extra oomph with some entertaining tunes from YouTube, it’s easy to do. Go ahead! This blog is going to break down into easy steps, for beginners, so your presentation actually pops with music. Let’s get started!

Why Add Music to Your Google Slides?

Adding music to your slides can help magic happen with presentations, especially when you are trying to work up a certain vibe or keep people interested. Here’s why you ought to include music:

• Better Engagement: The slide show becomes more dynamic and less monotonic with music.
• Mood Set: The right music will place you in the proper mood for your presentation. That might be an inspiring audio for a more motivational talk, or perhaps something that just plays in the background of a very serious event.
• Professionals: Adding the right, on-time music always brings some flair to the presentation that seems polished and thoughtful.

Let’s try to break down the steps on how to include YouTube music in Google Slides.

Step 1: Choose a YouTube Audio

Before we begin, you have to hunt for the best track to follow your presentation. For this purpose, you first go to YouTube and search for the song or background music that you like for your presentation. It may be some easy instrumental or even an upbeat pop song, whatever suits your style of presentation.

Tip: Not to infringe copyrights, you should find free royalty music. There are thousands of free music channels on YouTube that have tracks that you can use without copyright conflicts.

Step 2: Copy the YouTube Link

Once you’ve chosen your song, do the following:

• Share button: You should typically see this at the bottom of the video in the shape of an arrow.
• Copy the link: A shorter version of the URL will pop up in a tiny window. Click on “Copy Link.”

You have your YouTube ready. Now, let’s head over to Google Slides.

Step 3: Access Your Google Slides Presentation

If you haven’t already, open up a Google Slides presentation. You can make a new one or pull out an old slideshow.

Step 4: Embed the YouTube Video Link into Google Slides

This is where the magic comes in. Well, technically, you cannot add a background track from YouTube to Google Slides. But there’s an easy way to do this as well:

1. Identify the slide you’ll be using for the music.
2. Select the “Insert” option from the top menu.
3. Pick a video from the drop-down list.
4. Under the “Search” tab, find the “By URL” option and click it.
5. Add the link to YouTube, which you copied above, into the URL box.
6. Click the “Insert” button.

Now, the YouTube video is embedded into your slide.

Step 5: Change the Video

Since you’re mainly after the audio, you’ll want to adjust how the video appears on the slide:

• Shrink the video: Select the lower right corner of the video and drag it in to make it as small as possible, or even drag it off the visible slide area so it’s not distracting.
• Hide visual (optional). If you don’t want your audience to see the video playing, you could hide it off the edge of the slide. That way, the music plays, but the video won’t be showing.

Step 6: Auto-Play Your Video

Now, you don’t want to click on the play button every time you need to change slides, do you? Alright, get the music going auto-play:

1. Click the video you just added to the slide.
2. Click the “Format options” at the right-side panel.
3. Under “Video Playback,” select “Play automatically.”.

Step 7: Set Start and End Times if Desired.

If you only want a part of the YouTube audio to play, you need to add a start time and an end time:

1. Under “Format options,” find “Start at” and “End at.”
2. Indicate the specific video times you would like to include in your video. For example, if you want the audio to start at 30 seconds and would like it to go until 1:30, input those two times.

Step 8: Loop the Longer Video (optional)

If your presentation runs longer than the video, and you want the audio to play into another part of your presentation, you will need to loop the video on a few slides. Sadly, Google Slides has no functionality that you can enable to allow the video to automatically play or play continuously over the slide(s) for which you want the same audio to keep playing. A relatively painless fix is to use the following:

• Copy the slide that contains the video each time you want to repeat the audio to play again in your presentation.
• Or, use another audio editing software, such as Audacity, which allows you to repeat the same song many times into a single very long piece and upload this longer version to YouTube.

And that is it! You have inserted YouTube music into your Google Slides presentation. Not so hard, but certainly adds much value to the slides – making them more attractive and professional-looking. Regardless of whether you are preparing a project at school, a presentation for business, or maybe just for self-expression and some fun, adding a little piece of YouTube music to your work is brilliant.

Make use of auto-play and transition smoothening so that things go quite seamlessly. And don’t forget to change the video size so that things are clean and focused and all other things become neat and orderly.

Further Suggestions:

If you are working offline, download the music and change it into an audio file so that it can be easily used in other places for presentations.

Try it on your next presentation, and watch the attention rise for your audience!