Where does Keynote store the audio files in a presentation

If you want to see the contents of a Keynote 9 file, you change its name from "file.key" to "file.zip". Then you can unzip everything to a folder. The music file I embedded was made into an ACC sound Quicktime movie. I suppose you could edit this file, if necessary, and replace it. Then recompress this folder back into a zip archive and change the filename back to "file.key". Try THAT with Powerpoint, lol. I do this a lot when I need to extract images out of a presentation someone else made, especially when it was originally a ppt file.

Hi llhjunk1,

I don't usually use audio in my presentations but I did do a little test to see if I could help you figure our where the audio file resides.

I created a 1 page plain presentation. Then I dragged and dropped directly onto the page a 4.6MB audio file. When I ran the presentation, everything went well.
However, when I tried to throw away the audio file, it said that it was being used. I quit Keynote, threw away the file, and reopened Keynote. The presentation and audio are still fine.
I also checked the Keynote file of the presentation it is 4.8MB.
A plain Keynote presentation file normally takes up about 120-200KB. The difference of about 4.6MB corresponds with the size of my audio file.

I could be wrong, but all of this makes me deduce that the audio is converted and embedded directly inside your Keynote presentation. The audio playing in your presentation is not pointing to an externally converted file. Which also makes me believe that there's unfortunately nothing you can do about it.

Although this doesn't provide you with a solution, I hope that this helps you a little in figuring out where the audio file in a Keynote resides.

In KN's metrics inspector, the file, which was originally, say, an .mp4, is sometimes, but not always, seen as having been converted to .mov. I've seen this myself, it doesn't always appear, but sometimes, and I don't know why it's sometimes true and sometimes not. So this is my theory (disclaimer: I'm neither technically informed nor expert, but simply a frequent user, who likes to try all kinds of things out): KN, when it imports an audio, and probably a video file, too, makes it a .mov file, so it can be used more easily by QT, which seems to be KN's media presentation format. KN makes this conversion all by itself, it's coded into KN. Then, once the KN presentation has been saved, the whole shebang is saved together, and KN kind of swallows the QT whole. The QT .mov file is no longer a separate entity, but part of a whole KN doc. Perhaps someone expert in programming and doc codes could separate out the QT file afterwards, but the average user, however anal, will be unable to do it.

And it might well be a senseless and thankless task, even for the expert. The original audio or video file can be easily (depending on your expertise and the programs at your disposal) edited on its own, quite apart from any connection to KN. So the easiest method for anyone, even the expert, would be to do the editing on the original file, delete the unwanted unedited file from KN, and insert the edited one.

The question, at bottom, seems to be this: is someone most interested in doing something efficiently, or more interested in how something works, regardless the benefit (or not) of simply knowing, which may be its own reward. Those are two different goals. The answer to the second may sometimes point to why you don't do something, and not always just to how you can.

Once again, and at the risk of repeating myself (and several others who have bravely tried to understand your question): The MOV file does not exist anywhere but within the confines of the code that makes up your Keynote file. Keynote does not create a MOV file on your desktop, or anywhere else. There is no MOV file save for the one Keynote creates internally, apparently to facilitate easier integration with Quicktime. My suggestion is you should give up worrying about how to find a file you will never need to find, and can't find even if you did, because it doesn't exist. As a previous poster suggested, some things are meant not to be found.

Keynote 09 by default stores it's files as compressed. Previous versions saved them as a package and if you right-clicked on the file, you'd have the option to "Show Package Contents" and see your audio files. And, you're correct that if you alter those files, the altered version would play the next time you ran the presentation.

In order to change Keynote to allow this ability, go into the Preferences and, under General, choose "Save new documents as packages" under Saving:. In order to make a file you already have save itself as a package, open the file, select all the slides then Copy, then create a new file and Paste those slides in. When you save, all of the media that makes up that presentation will be accessible by a "Show Package Contents". In all other ways, the file will still act like a regular Keynote document, but remember that you'll have to compress it before you email it or transfer it to a flash drive (email and flash drives don't understand an OSX package).

I'm not exactly sure of what you want to do, and I'm not sure if my answer is the most efficient, or even wholly correct, but here goes ...

When you save a KN presentation (a KN doc) which includes an audio (or movie) file, you can save it 2 (3?) ways: either without or with the file being copied into the document, or as a " package". In a test file I just made with 3 white slides (title, slide with song, second slide with song) the results:

without: 3.8 MB; with: 9.4 MB; package: 9.4 MB. The essential difference, aside from size, is that if saved without, if you play the KN on another machine which doesn't have those audio files on it, the audio won't be there. To make the KN truly portable, you must save with, or as a package. (I'm not too sure of the concept of package in KN. In PP, saving as a package means you end up with a folder, which contains the PP and the media files, each as separate entities. Saving a KN package yields not a folder but a file, which looks to me identical to the result achieved by simply saving with, and seems to behave identically, as well.) The audio file you used will in any case remain where it was before you used it, but, if the KN doc is saved with, or as a package, a copy of it will go into the KN doc.

But then, what do you mean by "edit"? What do you want to edit, the KN presentation, or the audio file within it? If the former, I don't understand where the problem might be. If the latter: using the QT inspector within KN, you can change the length of the audio file (where in the song it starts and stops), whether to start it on click, or automatically after transition, or to loop it. If you wanted to do some other, more exotic audio editing, like reverbs or other effects, I'd do that on (a copy of) the original audio file (found wherever it was before) with another app (GarageBand, for instance), and then I'd replace the first, non-edited, version of the audio file in the KN doc with that.

Have I missed something?

Message edited by gbdoc: maybe someone will chime in to clarify the difference between "saved with" and a "package"

Try right-clicking on the Keynote file and choose "show package contents".

Gently poke around in there and see if you see the file.

I would try this on a small text project first.

Sorry - still confused: are you saying that the actual physical name of the audio file residing on your computer changes extensions after putting it into Keynote, or the embedded audio file once IN Keynote somehow changes it's extension? You shouldn't have to worry about an extension on an embedded file... Are you saying Keynote asks for the .MOV file when you attempt to open it or something?

If you need to edit the audio you should simply edit the original file, not try to edit the file you embedded. If so, you will have to re-insert the audio after you edit it.

I still think I'm not getting something here...

I'm not understanding the question I guess. If you are saving the presentation as a Keynote file (.KEY) it shouldn't be saving anything as a .MOV file. The only way to produce an .MOV is to export your presentation as such. The previous post is correct that the files are embedded (just like in PowerPoint) and once saved the audio files do not need to reside where Keynote can find them. You can't edit an .MOV in Keynote as it is now a Quicktime Movie file, not a Keynote file.

If something is embedded that means you CAN'T edit it separately from the file it's embedded in. I'm really not sure why you would want to edit the embedded file, but as you yourself claimed, anality may have something to do with it... and I'm still uncertain as to what exactly is getting renamed. Once an audio file is in Keynote it doesn't really have a filename anymore - so where exactly are you seeing it named with an MOV extension?

I detect a wistful note of resignation in your reply. Now that I read you're a tech person, I can understand your curiosity. I hope you don't give up as easily as that. Even if, as I guessed before, the audio file is swallowed by KN and undetectable by us common folk, it doesn't actually disappear, .mov or not .mov, one proof of which is the ease with which it can be deleted.

People around here might not know enough about codes and programming and the insides of KN to know the answer (I certainly don't), but you might try the Developer Forums (<http://developer.apple.com/devforums/>), which is probably where the techies hang out.

Good luck!