How to Add Sound in Adobe After Effects CS3

Hey! What’s up and welcome to another Roberts Productions video tutorial. Today, I am going to be remaking the how to add sound in Adobe After Effects CS3 tutorial, because I have read all these comments and seen that a lot of people are having problems with inserting WAV forms, WAV form files, .WAV.

As for Shaneyspatch, thanks for the vid, I can’t seem to add sound either. I'm using a WAV form, so what gives, is it because I'm using a trial version? Also when you click to make movie at the bottom of the page, it didn’t have all the buttons you had.

Well, that’s is the trial version and it’s limited. Apparently 42561415, it worked for him or her. It doesn’t play a sound when I put it into my video. How do you convert MP3 to Wav form? Don’t even read that one, it won’t work with me.

So, I'm just going to remake this whole tutorial in all. The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to open Adobe After Effects CS3, the paid version, not the trial, okay. The limitation with the trial version is that first of all, it’s only a 30-day trial and second of all, it won’t let you do all of the things that you can do on the paid version. So, if you’re on a trial version, it will only let you insert .WAV forms or .WAV sound files. If you’re on the regular version that it’s paid for, then it will let you insert MP3 files.

What we’re going to be working on today is this spark text. I have the resolution all the way down so that it will work a little bit faster. Well, we’re going to be adding sound to this and I think it messed up because it used to be different. But anyway, we can still add some sound. First thing I want to show you, here’s my sounds folder. I have a WAV form and I have an MP3 form. First thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to show you an example by hitting this WAV form, playing it. That works, okay. I like that sound. So I'm just going to click and drag it into my project. Once I do that, it shows up here the big .WAV.

Now, if I want to put sound into this composition, I’ll just drag this Big Day sound file down into the composition, just like that. Now, if I hit LL, I’ll get the WAV form. It’s a straight line but we’ll see what happens. Render it out and that’s why it doesn’t have a WAV form because it’s so short. But you can see how that works. That sparks kind of makes like cool sound with this. It’s actually a little bit wider than I thought.

So that’s a WAV file. Now for me, all I have to do to enter an MP3 file is just click and drag it into my project and then drag it down into my composition and it will go there. I’ll delete this one and it will be here, LL probably, you could see the WAV forms, okay. So you can line those up how you want them. So now, if I render this again, it should have Linkin Park, “What I’ve Done”. And so I could drag this, drag this more and that’s an MP3 file.

Now, if you’re in a trial version, I'm going to show you how you can convert an MP3 to WAV. Our first method is if you have a converter. I have a magic video converter. You can have a song converter, any kind of converter. I'm going to go down here to WAV, okay. All I have to do is open my sound files, drag my MP3 file into the input file name and then hit convert, and it’s converting to WAV form. So now, if I go to my sounds, I have Linkin Park, “What I’ve Done” in WAV form and it just sounds the same.

Now that’s one method. That’s if you have a converter and I know a lot of converters out there aren’t free. If you’re lucky, you can get a free one but it may not be as good.

So another way we can do this is if we use Audacity. Audacity is a free sound editing program. You can get it from audacity.sourceforge.net up here and you can go down here, download Audacity for Windows and they also have the Beta version. It is also available for Mac OS-X. So if we are in Audacity and we drag our .MP3 file, Linkin Park, “What I’ve Done” into here and well, actually just leave it like that. And if I go to file, export as WAV. And I can click, I put dash to save, exports here, Linkin Park, “What I’ve Done” dash two and that’s in a WAV format.

There are some simple ways to add sound into your Adobe After Effects CS3 project. Now, if you’re using a trial version, I'm not sure if it even lets you put any sounds in WAV form or MP3, but I'm pretty sure it doesn’t let you put an MP3, maybe in WAV form. Let me know but if you use those converters and convert everything to WAV, .WAV form or WAV, then you can insert your files into your project and drag them down to your composition. It’s just as simple as that. Drag them down to your composition, press LL to see the WAV forms and you can drag this to where you want it. Obviously, this sound file doesn’t have the WAV form because it’s so short, but that’s how you do it.

If you have any questions, please contact me, send me a message on YouTube. If you’re on YouTube, please rate, comment and subscribe to our channel. Hopefully, this tutorial was a lot clear and understanding. We’ve also got some new software or tutorial creating, so hopefully my voice is a lot clear and thank you for watching until next time. Take care!