Convert OGG to WAV

Why turn OGG into WAV

OGG is great for shipping sound: small files, decent quality, no license fees. It is less handy for working on sound. The usual reasons to unpack it:

• Editing and cutting. Editors work directly on WAV, and some older or simpler ones don't import OGG at all.
• Video projects. Video editors take WAV without complaint and are often choosier about OGG.
• Samplers, trackers and hardware that only load uncompressed sound.
• Game projects where an engine or tool expects WAV for short effects.

Decoding to WAV once means the next program has nothing to work out, and you can keep editing without stacking up another round of lossy compression every time you save. Many people keep their working library of effects as WAV for that reason, and only make OGGs when a game or app is packaged.

Choosing the WAV format

Vorbis and Opus decode to floating-point sound, so 16-bit is plenty for playback and most editing, while 32-bit float gives a mixer extra headroom. The sample rate stays as it was. Vorbis files are usually 44.1 or 48 kHz; Opus decodes at 48 kHz whatever was recorded, so an OGG with Opus inside becomes a 48 kHz WAV. Mono effects stay mono, which keeps them at half the size of stereo.

If a tool insists on one rate, say 44.1 kHz for a sampler, pick it under Sample rate and every file in the batch is converted to it, whatever it was before. Not sure what a pack uses? The file list shows the rate on every row, so you can see at a glance whether it mixes 44.1 and 48 kHz sounds.

Size, names and what stays behind

WAV is uncompressed, so the files grow: a 160 kbps OGG at about 1.2 MB a minute becomes roughly 10.6 MB a minute as a 44.1 kHz stereo WAV, close to nine times larger. Short effects stay small regardless; a two-second mono click at 48 kHz is about 190 KB.

The OGG's tags, such as title and artist, are not copied into the WAV. Loop markers that a game keeps in those tags are lost the same way, so music that looped in the game plays straight through once as a WAV; set the loop again in your editor or engine.

File names do carry over, which matters when a project refers to sounds by name: only the extension changes, and a WAV whose name is already taken gets “(2)” added rather than replacing the old one.

Editing, then back to OGG

Once they are WAVs, the effects can be trimmed, faded and levelled in Octoolo's Audio Editor; see the MP3 cutter, fade in and out and normalize audio pages, which work the same way for WAV. Several effects can also be laid end to end on one track to build a combined sound, as the audio joiner shows.

When the edits are done, the same converter turns the WAVs back into OGG for your game or app: pick OGG and a quality, and Vorbis is written at 256, 160 or 112 kbps. MP3 to OGG explains how Vorbis and Opus compare. Starting from the edited WAV, rather than re-saving the old OGG, keeps that to a single round of compression. For a quick listen or a share, OGG to MP3 is the smaller option, and it plays on phones and in cars where OGG often doesn't.