Convert OGG to MP3

OGG is a wrapper, not one format

An .ogg file is a container, and two quite different codecs live in it:

• Vorbis, the classic one, used for music and sound in games, mods, open-source programs and web apps.
• Opus, the newer one, built for speech and low bit rates. Voice messages from WhatsApp and Telegram use it, and are often saved as .ogg.

Both play in VLC, Chrome, Firefox and on Android, but Apple's apps and plenty of car stereos and portable players skip them. MP3 is the common ground. Octoolo reads what is inside each file and decodes it accordingly, so both kinds can share one batch, and the .oga extension some apps use is picked up too. Ogg itself comes from the Xiph.Org Foundation, the group that also looks after FLAC.

Picking the right quality

For Vorbis music, As it is is the right choice: a 160 kbps OGG becomes a 160 kbps MP3, about 1.2 MB a minute, and a 112 kbps one is lifted to 128 kbps, the lowest rate the presets use. Asking for more than the OGG had just makes the file bigger, since converting cannot win back detail the Vorbis encoder left out.

An OGG with Opus inside doesn't state its bit rate, so As it is treats it like high-quality sound and writes 320 kbps (160 for mono). That is wasteful for a voice message. Small gives 128 kbps, or 64 kbps for a mono recording, which is roughly 0.5 MB per minute and perfectly clear for speech. There is more about voice notes on OPUS to MP3.

Sample rates of 44.1 and 48 kHz are kept as they are, and stereo stays stereo unless you choose Mono under More settings.

Before you convert

• Tags stay behind. Titles and artist names stored inside an OGG file are not copied into the MP3, so each MP3 is known by its file name. Rename the files first if that matters, or add the tags in your music player afterward.
• Loose files only. Many games pack their sounds inside archive files. Octoolo converts .ogg files you can see in a folder, not sounds still packed inside a game.
• Loops and markers. Some games store loop points for their music as OGG tags. Like the other tags, they don't carry over, so a looping track becomes a plain MP3 that plays once.
• Going into an editor? For a sampler, a video editor or more editing, OGG to WAV avoids a second round of lossy compression.

What to do with the MP3s

Once they are MP3s, the files go anywhere: onto a phone, a USB stick for the car, or into iTunes. In Octoolo itself you can put one under a video with the Video Editor (add music to a video), cut the part you want with the MP3 cutter, or make an iPhone ringtone with the ringtone maker.

Game music is often mastered quieter than pop songs. A track that sounds weak next to the rest of your playlist can be raised up to twice its volume in the Audio Editor; see MP3 volume booster. Short effects and voice lines that you only want to hear once in a while are fine as they are.