Playing .pps file using Keynote

What format are the original sounds in? It is possible they are in a format that the Mac does not understand.

The easiest way is also a bit geeky. Hold down the Control key, then click and hold on the Keynote file to bring up the contextual menu. Choose "Show Package Contents", which will open a new Finder window that shows all the files, including the sound files, that are part of the presentation. If you see files with the extension ".wma", those are sound files that likely will not play directly in Keynote. (If the files have extensions of ".mp3" or ".aif" or ".aiff", then they should play correctly.)

It sounds like, for whatever reason (possibly sound file format issues) the original sound files did not get converted and saved into Keynote, since there are no sound files in the Keynote package.

What I would suggest is, in the trial version of PowerPoint, try saving the original PowerPoint .pps file as a "PowerPoint Package". What this option does is create a folder that has both the presentation and whatever media files (including sound files) that it uses.

When you do this, look in the folder, and see a) if there are now separate sound files in that folder, and b) what format they are in. If they are in a format that Keynote doesn't understand, you may need to convert them to something like MP3, and insert them into the saved Keynote version.

PowerMac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

I'm afraid at this point I'm out of ideas, unless you want to play the show in PowerPoint and grab the audio with something like Audio Hijack. Perhaps someone else with more familiarity with PowerPoint can provide some other suggestions.

If you have access to the .wav file, you should be able to convert it to MP3 using something like Audacity. However, I'm not sure what you could do about the other slides, if there is supposed to be audio on them as well.

Serge, I would imagine that there are other tools, possibly freeware, that will convert WAV to MP3. I don't know of any offhand, but I'm sure a bit of Googling would find what you need.