How to change duration of music on menu?

Question

Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0 - Windows Vista 64bit
I'm getting there. (Thanks to your help!)
I started from (almost) "scratch" so I'd have a nice "clean" video to burn to a DVD. I've reset all my chapter markers. Perfect, in Preview. I've chosen my menu and adjusted the motion scene selection buttons. Gorgeous, in Preview. I don't like the "default" music that comes with the menu I chose. I read some old threads here and found there is a 30 second limit, so I used Audacity to cut a WAV clip that's 16.23 seconds long to use as a loop. Here's the problem:
I clicked "Browse" and selected the same music clip for the Main Menu and each of three successive Scene Selection pages. Works fine on the Scene Selection pages, but the Main Menu won't play past 13 seconds for some inexplicable reason. I tried manually adjusting the "duration" to 16.23, but it snaps back to 13 as soon as I hit Preview.
I've closed the program, restarted my computer, made a new (identical) music clip (just in case the Main Menu didn't want to "share") but it still won't take it. It plays the first 13 seconds then abruptly loops back to the start, which is NOT a *smooth* transition - but it would be, IF it would play the whole 16.23 seconds like the other menu pages do without any problem.
I'm open to suggestions, but I sure hope I don't have to start over again. Oh, BTW - I tried switching to a totally different Disc Menu, just out of curiosity, and that one played the whole music clip on the Main Menu page without a problem... but I don't like the look of that menu, I want the other one - the one that's giving me grief (of course). Don't understand why it would work on one and not the other.
Please advise. Many thanks in advance. Cheers, Val
To answer a question one of you (Bill?) asked on the previous thread about my source material --
It was originally a PAL video cassette, converted to NTSC DVD. It's all on my computer now - four VOB files: three @ .99GB each, and one @ 691 MB. It's a one-hour Peter Allen TV Special broadcast in Australia. I am removing the advertising and making a menu that will allow selection of each song individually. I want more of a "concert" and less of a "TV show" as the finished product.

Answer 1

Here are the results of my test of the Broadway Menu Set and the exact steps that I used. It starts a bit before the work with the Video and Audio, but this might be useful to someone creating a Menu Set for use with PrE.
I got the Standard (4:3) PSD’s for the Broadway Menu Set, both the Main Menu (mm) and Scene Selection (ss), plus the MPG and the MP3 files. To get these Menus to display in PrE’s Create Menus selection area, I Opened the PSD’s in Photoshop, and created the PNG “thumbnails” for them, using the naming convention of the other PNG thumbnails as my guide. I first resized each PSD to 160 x 128 pixels, and then did a Save_As_PNG-8, using the correct naming convention, used elsewhere. These were placed into a new “(V) Broadway” folder with the PSD’s, the Motion Asset MPEG and the Audio MP3 file. All displayed fine in PrE 4.
In a PrE Project, I took the original Broadway MPEG and used TimeStretch to increase its Duration to the 29;20, that I had used before (that would match my Audio file from earlier tests), and did a Share, choosing MPEG. This resulted in an m2v, but that worked fine.
In PrE’s Create Menus Panel, I chose the new, stretched m2v, and the Duration changed to match the 29;20 Duration of the Motion Asset. Next, I linked to the previous SmartSound WAV, that was edited to have a Duration of exactly 29;20. The Duration for that Asset changed to 29;20 instantly.
I previewed and the searchlights were now slower (as was to be expected) and the limo was also slower pulling in and out. The Menu’s Motion Background was smooth, but slower. The new Audio with Fade-in and Fade-out, played perfectly, and the Menu Looped very nicely. Actually the Looping was now better than with the original MPEG and MP3 Assets! This was a nice surprise, as there was a bit of a jolt, when the original Audio Looped. Not sure what could be done to eliminate that, but think that it would be easily accomplished in Audition, or Audacity. Maybe a test for another day.
I burned a DVD RW and the Menu worked perfectly. I did not complete the test by altering the Scene Selection Menus (in my test Project, I needed three of these), but feel confident that they would function the same way.
In conclusion, if one needs to use other Audio source files, this can be done, so long as one takes two things into consideration: the Video Motion Asset will determine the Looping/Duration, and the Duration must be < 30;00. I chose 29;20 to give myself a bit of headroom. Now, one needs to consider the visual effect of using TimeStretch to modify the Duration of a Background Video - here, it was fine. The Audio needs to match perfectly, or be ever so slightly shorter (I’m talking about a few Audio Units here - slight indeed), than the Video Asset.
Now, one is still limited to the 30;00 Duration limit, in PrE, but up to that point, the chosen Audio can be just as long as the Video.
I strongly recommend using a short Fade-in and Fade-out on the Audio, so that there is a lead-in/lead-out that will keep from having harsh jumps with the Loop.
Hope that this helps someone in the future.
Hunt