I need to present some of my music to a set of Nature photographs, as a slide show. Can any of you advise some suggested ways to achieve this?
 
I have the music (currently as a 44.1khz/24 bit file); and I have the photographs as high res .JPG format. I don't have any video editing software, but can invest in some. I know only the very basics at the moment of using video editing software, and no idea how best to incorporate the music at its highest possible quality.
 
The aim is to make 2 things :
1. A movie file that can be easily played on a PC, at the highest possible quality of video and sound.
2. A Youtube upload of the same file, at whatever is the best possible quality for that medium.
 
If anyone has any advice how to approach this, I would appreciate.

I knocked up this video in a couple of hours with Sony Vegas, very easy to drag and drop and stills and apply fades or other effects as needed.
 

 
I've also done DVDs from Sony Vegas, very easy to follow the rendering instructions.

I think most video editing programs have  presets that allow you to output your video/slideshow
to match your intended audience. I use Vegas Pro and it lets me render out to a wide variety of formats.

If you're looking for a video editor somebody in the Deals forum had posted a link to Corel's Black Friday sale which includes Video Studio. It's supposed to be pretty good from what I've read.

http://www.corel.com/en/special-offers/

Thanks for the feedback. 
 
I checked out Sony Vegas --- they seem to have 3 versions Edit, Normal, and Suite, with quite a difference between them $200 on each level.
 
I notice all have Max bit depth / sampling rate 24-bit / 192 kHz (and I checked out their consumer version Vegas Movie Studio has Max bitrate / bit depth 16-bit / 48 kHz :   so will that mean that the Pro version will have higher quality audio, or does it just mean when its converted to movie format, the audio quality is in the end the same?

Still photo slide show with music is about as basic as any video editing software may be able to do. 
 
Check out the free Windows Movie Maker.
 
https://youtu.be/CCzk2_yQ2BA
 
I found WMV format to be the smallest size video for Windows so far, but if your video consist of mainly photos, the video size will be small regardless of video format. I think (not too sure) most video format may also compress your audio. 

I asked exactly the same question a couple years ago, got a lot of good advice, and ended up using Movie Maker. It's simple but did exactly what I wanted: create a slide show with dissolves and my own music behind it. 

Yes, I agree, a slide show is pretty simple in video editing terms.   But how about the audio, will Movie Maker deliver a high quality result?   The final file is going to be played at an event in a large space, and needs to be highest quality possible.

There is a setting for high quality audio (up to  440 Kbps, 90 Hz Stereo). 
 
https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-can-i-get-good-sound-quality-on-windows-movie-maker
 
You just have to try it out if it's good enough, since it's free :)

I use Windows Movie Maker for the video's I've done.  It handles your photos and video clips and I have found it to be extremely easy to use. The fact that it's free and probably already on your computer if you have the Windows operating system is a bonus.

I have purchased a few "more advanced" video editing programs and have spent many hours in frustration trying to get them to do a simple video. After wasting many hours,  I took the pics and video and music files from the folder, threw them in WMM and had a finished video in no time at all.

Here's a few examples done in Windows Movie Maker
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CLsKzreM7k
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DmLXESjGWs&t=346s
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNknV1GhFMM
 
It's a way to get it done quickly and efficiently.  You can use WMM without too big of a learning curve. That same thing generally can't be said about the more expensive video editing programs. Of course, in the bigger programs, you can do all sorts of fancy stuff that WMM won't do.

I've been using the Cyberlink PowerDirector for many years... not a bunch of money with good features.  
 
http://www.cyberlink.com/