Dr. Patricia Caldwell(click for bio)

Embrance Ambassador

How to Use Your Own Songs in a Funeral Slideshow

Everybody in the family knows the song. It was on in the kitchen for thirty years, or it came out of the garage every Saturday afternoon, and there is a copy of it somewhere in the house. That is the song that belongs in the slideshow.

What often happens instead is that somebody asks about the music and is told to choose from a list, or asked for three titles and nothing more, and the slideshow comes back set to something soft and pleasant that has nothing to do with anyone. It is a small loss sitting inside a much larger one, and it is the kind that stays with people, because it was fixable and nobody had a spare hour that week to find out how.

It is fixable. What follows is where the number three comes from, how many songs a slideshow actually needs, what order to put them in, and how to get a file of your own into one yourself. If you are still deciding what the songs should be, our list of funeral slideshow songs is organized by mood and by relationship. This page is about how many, in what order, and how they get in.

Why you are often offered three songs

It helps to know what is happening on the other side of that conversation, because it is not a rule handed down from anywhere and it is not somebody being difficult.

Every song a funeral home puts into a slideshow is hand work by a person on staff. They have to be given the song or go find it, end up with an actual file of it, cut it to a sensible length, and then make the music and the photographs come out even, which means moving the photo timing or moving the music until they do. Then it gets built, checked on the screen in the chapel, and finished. The service is usually the day after tomorrow. The same person is also laying out the program, fielding calls from three relatives who each remembered one more photograph, and doing all of it for two other families in the same week.

Three songs is about what fits in that. It is a workload number, not a measure of how much you are allowed to have loved somebody, and the person who quoted it to you was most likely trying to be certain they can deliver what they promise. Two things follow from that. A specific song you can hand them as a file is much easier to say yes to than an open-ended request for more music. And if the answer is still three, building it yourself is genuinely not hard, and it lifts the whole job off their desk in a week when that is a kindness.

How many songs your slideshow actually needs

Do the arithmetic before the conversation, so you are asking for a number rather than a favor.

An ordinary song runs about three and a half minutes. Held five seconds apiece, that covers a little over forty photographs. At six seconds it is thirty-five. So the rule you can do in your head is that one song is about forty photos.

That makes the rest simple. Forty photographs is one song. Eighty is two. A hundred and twenty is three, and by then you are at ten and a half minutes, which is longer than most services want to sit still for. Two or three songs is where a slideshow the room watches together nearly always lands, and that is not a coincidence. It is the same arithmetic the funeral home is doing.

A slideshow left looping through a visitation is a different job. It comes back around every few minutes, and nobody in the room is sitting through a whole pass of it, so the only thing extra songs buy you is a longer stretch before somebody standing near the screen hears the same one twice. Five or six gives about twenty minutes of that, which is plenty.

The calculator below runs the arithmetic in the other direction, from a photo count to a runtime. For the pacing side of the same question, see how long a funeral slideshow should be.

Whichever direction you come at it from, aim to land on whole songs. The most common avoidable flaw in a finished slideshow is music chopped off partway through a line because the photographs ran out first. Nothing else says quite so plainly that a thing was assembled in a hurry, and nothing is easier to prevent: add or drop a handful of photographs until the total sits near the length of the songs, and it ends where the song ends.

Choosing an order that carries an arc

Two or three songs is few enough that the order is a real decision, and it is worth ten minutes of thought.

Open with the restrained one. The instinct is to lead with the biggest song, the one that means the most. Resist it. The first minute is people finding seats and settling, over the earliest photographs, which tend to be small and quiet and a little formal. A soaring chorus over a baby in a christening gown asks more of a room than it is ready to give yet, and it spends the song you were going to need later.

Put the one that was theirs in the middle. The middle of a slideshow is the middle of a life: the working years, the family years, the photographs most of the people in that room are actually standing in. That is where the record they played constantly belongs. Everyone who knows it will know it inside four notes, and they are the ones who will still be talking about it on the drive home.

Close on something that resolves. A final song that builds and builds leaves a room lifted an inch off the ground with nowhere to set it down. Something that settles instead gives everybody somewhere to land, and it lets the last photograph hold for a moment without the music asking for attention.

Then look at where the changes fall. One song ending and the next beginning is audible, with a beat of quiet in between, and the room reads it as punctuation whether you intended it that way or not. So put it somewhere that means something. A song change across a change of chapter, childhood into the young family, or the working years into the grandchildren, feels deliberate. The same change dropped into the middle of a run of wedding photographs feels like something went wrong.

Working out where a boundary falls is one piece of division. A song that runs three minutes twenty is two hundred seconds, and at five seconds a photograph it ends after the fortieth. So if you want the second song to open the family years, count forward to where the family years begin and put roughly that many photographs ahead of it.

Getting your own tracks in

What you need is an actual audio file, sitting on the computer or phone you are building from. That is the entire requirement, and it is also the step that stops people, because the place most of us listen to music is not a place that hands out files.

Where the file comes from. A song bought as a download is a file, and it arrives in your downloads folder or your music library like anything else. A CD ripped on a computer that still has a drive is a file. So is one a relative already has and can email or text over, and somebody in the family usually has the one you are after. A streaming subscription is not. The offline copy inside a streaming app stays inside that app and will not appear when you go looking for something to upload, which is worth knowing before you spend an evening hunting for it.

What format. Anything ordinary: MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, OGG, or FLAC. Embrance accepts all of those, up to 30 MB per song, which is a generous ceiling. A four minute MP3 usually weighs five to eight megabytes, and only a full lossless file comes anywhere near the limit.

If the track is too long. A six or seven minute piece works fine; it simply means more photographs. If you would rather it fit what you have, trim it before you upload. Any free audio editor will do it, and Audacity is the usual answer since it runs on Mac and Windows both. Two things matter when you cut. Cut at the end of a phrase rather than in the middle of a line, so it sounds like an ending instead of a power failure. And fade the last second or two down to nothing, because a file that stops dead is startling in a quiet room in a way it never is on headphones.

Adding more than one. On Embrance you choose your own audio at the music step and it uploads alongside the photographs. Add a single song and it repeats to cover the whole slideshow. Add two or more and they play in the order you added them, with a second of quiet between each, and the set starts over as a block when it reaches the end. Levels are evened out across whatever you upload, so a softly recorded piano piece and a loud one do not arrive at different volumes. There is no fixed limit on how many you add, which means the count is a decision about the slideshow rather than a number somebody gives you. If you would rather not source anything at all, there is a built-in set of six gentle instrumental tracks to choose from instead.

Test it with the photos before the day

Watch the whole thing once, beginning to end, with the sound up, on the largest screen you can put it on. Not scrubbed through, and not with the sound off. Ten minutes, once, straight through.

Three things surface on that pass and almost nowhere else. Music running out before the photographs do, or being cut off partway through a line at the end. A song change landing in the middle of a stretch of photographs where it has nothing to mark. And a song that turns out to mean something different over photographs than it does in the car, where a line you have heard a thousand times without ever hearing it is suddenly about something else entirely. That last one is much better caught in your kitchen than in the third row.

If it survives that, it is finished. Put it on a drive, bring a second copy on something else, and let it be done.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use my own music in a funeral slideshow?

Yes, and practically all it takes is an audio file on the device you are building from. You choose the file, it uploads with your photographs, and it plays underneath them. On Embrance you can add one song or several, in any common format such as MP3, M4A, or WAV, up to 30 MB each. If the family plans to post the finished video online afterward for people who could not attend, there is one practical thing to check first, and our comparison of memorial slideshow makers covers it in its own FAQ.

How many songs do I need for a funeral slideshow?

Work it out from the photographs rather than guessing. At five seconds a photograph, one ordinary three and a half minute song carries about forty of them, so eighty photographs is two songs and a hundred and twenty is three. A slideshow the room sits and watches together usually lands on two or three. One left looping through a visitation wants five or six, which gives roughly twenty minutes before anyone hears the same song twice. Choose whole songs and let them set the length, rather than fixing a runtime and cutting a song to fit it.

How long should each song be in a memorial video?

Use each song at its natural length, which for most recordings is three to four minutes, and build the photo count around it rather than the other way round. Trim only when a track is genuinely long, such as a six or seven minute piece, and then cut at the end of a phrase rather than mid-line and fade the last second or two. The number that actually matters is the total: when the songs add up to about the runtime of the photographs, nothing gets chopped off in the middle.

What order should the songs go in?

Open with the most restrained one, because the first minute is people settling in over the earliest photographs, and a big chorus asks more of the room than it is ready to give. Put the song that was truly theirs in the middle, over the years most people in the room knew them. Close on something that resolves rather than builds. Then check where the changes land, because a song change sits well on a change of chapter, such as childhood into the family years, and badly in the middle of one.