PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

JewelBeat: Conversation with Shirley Lewis

Shirley Lewis is the Licensing Director at JewelBeat.com. With over 10 years of experience in the music industry, specifically in music licensing for retail, Shirley has worked to license music for numerous Fortune 500 companies. A lover of all music, social media shy yet a computer nerd, Shirley Lewis onboard with the JewelBeat team is looking to change the landscape of music licensing, one $0.99 track at a time.

In this conversation, Shirley discusses why and how you can use JewelBeat’s music clips.

Geetesh: Tell us more about JewelBeat, what is the type of music you provide, and how much does this music cost?

Shirley: JewelBeat is all about music for your projects. Specifically 99 cents music for your projects. What we do is license music for commercial and non-commercial projects. Our customers use our music for a host of usages including presentations, slideshows, photos, video, broadcast, corporate use and more. What’s great about our music is that it is completely royalty free worldwide.

Using licensed music is a good idea to keep in the legal side of things. Commercial music or music you purchased for your listening pleasure are not licensed legally for you to use for your projects. It can cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars to license commercial music plus the process can be all too overwhelming and complicated. JewelBeat offers an easy solution to purchasing and using music legally for your projects.

JewelBeat has a wide selection of music styles to fit every project. We have the typical rock, pop, country, urban, atmospheres to eclectic world, well-known tunes, holiday music as well as obscure selection like 8-bit video game music, chanting music and the likes.

Within each broad category you will find a deep wealth of selection. Take for example Rock. You will find pop rock, college rock, hard rock, soft rock, retro rock, alternative rock and more. With 35,000 tracks and growing, you are bound to find something you like and most importantly that works for your project.

Often times, I am asked, “What is the best rock track you have” and respond after a long pause, “What sort of rock do you like?” I do have my personal favorites but music is very subjective, and it really is more of what kind of music that will fit my project. That is how we compose our music. We compose our music from the view point of how it will be use in our customers’ projects.

Aside from our ultra attractive $0.99 per track music, JewelBeat provides customers with the option to purchase download CDs or albums which are collections of 10 tracks of a similar theme including all edit versions for just $19. This is pretty revolutionary seeing that most similar offerings are priced at $10 to $100 per track. At JewelBeat, the value and quality of our music is unbeatable at just $0.99 per track or $19 per CD.

Other products available include 12 themed JewelSticks which are 10 CDs grouped by themes as well as our JewelDisks that offer either the best 100 CDs in our library (JewelDisk Mini) or our complete library (JewelDisk Max).

Geetesh: How suitable is the sound content on JewelBeat for use in PowerPoint presentations?

Shirley: Music from the JewelBeat library would work great in PowerPoint presentations. You will find multiple edit versions available for every song in our library. You can purchase all versions of a track for just $2.99 giving you a great mix of edit versions to add to your PowerPoint presentations. Our alternate version work great to give a more subdued or tone down version or the track while our stingers are great as transitions, intros or endings of a presentation.

JewelBeat also offers a Custom Length Edit service where we can edit any track to any duration as per your requirement for just $9.99. This offers great convenience to our customers requiring a certain duration length without having to learn audio editing. What’s more this opens up our complete library to anyone searching for specific duration length tracks as this is no longer a limitation.

JewelBeat does not sell any sound effects but we do have over 3000 free sound effects from beeps to clicks, common environment effect, musical effect and more. This is an excellent free resource that would work well with presentations.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Music, PowerPoint, Sounds

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Apply Glow Effects

PowerPoint 2011 for Mac includes the same Shape Effects that are part of PowerPoint 2007 and 2011 on Windows — we have already explored how you can apply Shadow and Reflection effects to selected shapes in PowerPoint 2011. In this tutorial, we move to the next effect, Glow that adds a hazed color perimeter outside the shape area — yes, this is an Outer Glow and not an Inner Glow effect.

Learn to apply a Glow effects to shapes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Effects, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Advanced Reflection Effect Options

Reflections can look so cool — and since they show the same fill and outline attributes of what they reflect, they can end up being so distracting for your audiences! However, most of PowerPoint’s reflection presets that you learned to apply in our Reflection Effects for Shapes in PowerPoint 2011 are a little too attractive. The good news is that you can tone down the effect a little — or if you want you can also get more adventurous and have your slides bounce off their projected screens! Whatever your scenario may be, you can edit the reflection properties to suit your creative freedom — for instance, you can change the transparency or distance of the reflection, as you will learn in this tutorial.

Learn how you can make changes to the Reflection effect applied to shapes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Effects, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials

Learn PowerPoint 2010 for Windows: Text Layout Options

PowerPoint broadly provides three types of text containers: text placeholders, text boxes, and shapes — and although boundaries between these three types of text containers are blurred, all the three are sufficiently similar in their characteristics for layout options for the text contained inside them. In this tutorial, we will explore the alignment and text direction options for text within a text container in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Learn how you can control text layout in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Text, Tutorials

Cookie Cutter Shapes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

This technique originated from a video clip that Bruce Gabrielle posted on his blog — this video showed you how you can create a triangular table in PowerPoint by either creating a picture of the table itself (which makes the table non-editable) or by creating a picture of the table with just empty cells so that you can place a transparent table with figures or words over it. While both techniques are amazing, I wanted to use a process whereby not only is the table editable, but the ending shape need not be limited to just a triangle. Also, you can use this to hide and show parts of not just a table, but almost anything else including video clips.

Learn how to make cookie cutter shapes in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Design, Graphics, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tables, Tutorials