How to Add Music to PDF with Adobe Acrobat

July 31, 20232.2K views

Are you trying to figure out how to add audio to a PDF? This makes a PDF slideshow or presentation more engaging and dynamic, thus it might be helpful. Fortunately, PDF files can readily include audio thanks to Adobe Acrobat. The methods for adding audio to PDF with and without Acrobat will be covered in this article.

You may need to send a non-editable file type to someone when you need to share your PowerPoint presentation as a PDF. However, the converted PDF does not contain any sound or music clips from the original PowerPoint presentation. At other times, you may just want to add some sound or music to an existing PDF, even if that PDF was not created from a PowerPoint file.

Whatever your reason to add sound or music may be, it’s easy to achieve these results as long as you have the following prerequisites:

  1. A PDF that you want to use – this PDF should allow editing and preferably should not be password protected.
  2. Adobe's Acrobat Professional software – you cannot do this within the free Acrobat Reader. For this tutorial, we are using Acrobat X Pro, but any of the newer versions should work.
  3. A sound or music clip – essentially this is an audio file. If you are using Microsoft Windows, make sure you use a WAV file. Mac users can similarly use an AIFF file.

Steps to Add Music to PDF with Adobe Acrobat

Step1.

Open the PDF you are using with Adobe Acrobat Pro, as shown in Figure 1, below. Make sure you are on the page where you want to add the music or sound clip.

??53.png

Step2.

Then choose the View | Show/Hide | Navigation Panes | Page Thumbnails option, as shown in Figure 2 – or you can even press the F4 keyboard shortcut.

??54.png

Step3.

This will bring up the Page Thumbnails pane on the left, as shown in Figure 3, below.

??55.png

Step4.

Now right-click the thumbnail that represents your active page, and choose the Page Properties option, as shown in Figure 4, below.

??56.png

Step5.

This will bring up the Page Properties dialog box shown in Figure 5 – make sure you are on the Actions tab of this dialog box.

??57.png

Step6.

Click the Select Action box, and select the Play a Sound option from the resultant drop-down list (see Figure 6).

??58.png

Step7.

Click the Add button (see earlier in Figure 5). This brings up the Select Sound File dialog box, as shown in Figure 7, below.

??59.png

Step8.

Browse to and choose a WAV file (or an AIFF file if you are on a Mac) – remember the files you choose must be uncompressed. Click the Open button, as shown in Figure 8, below.

??60.png

Step9.

Back in the Page Properties dialog box, click the OK button. Then choose File | Save in Acrobat Pro to save your changes. Close the file.

Step10.

Now open the file again in Acrobat Pro and navigate to the page where you added the sound/music clip – it should play instantly!

Conclusion

It might not be a frequent chore to add music to PDF files. Users typically search for tools with functionality like comment tools, OCR, and more for editing, converting, producing, or exporting PDF files. WPS Office allows you to produce PDF files from more than 20 different document formats and edit PDF text and image content. Additional choices include reducing the size of the PDF file and adding alternative form options to PDF forms. The OCR capability, which can convert scanned PDFs into editable and searchable files, is another potent feature. You may complete all these activities with WPS Office.

15 years of office industry experience, tech lover and copywriter. Follow me for product reviews, comparisons, and recommendations for new apps and software.