Importing audio samples

Supported files

Godot provides three options to import your audio data: WAV, Ogg Vorbis and MP3.

Each has different advantages.

  • WAV files use raw data or light compression (IMA-ADPCM). They are lightweight on the CPU to play back (hundreds of simultaneous voices in this format are fine). The downside is that they take up a lot of disk space.
  • Ogg Vorbis files use a stronger compression that results in much smaller file size, but require significantly more processing power to play back.
  • MP3 files use better compression than WAV with IMA-ADPCM, but worse than Ogg Vorbis. This means that a MP3 file with roughly equal quality to Ogg Vorbis will be significantly larger. On the bright side, MP3 requires less CPU usage to play back compared to Ogg Vorbis. This makes MP3 useful for mobile and HTML5 projects where CPU resources are limited, especially when playing multiple compressed sounds at the same time (such as long ambient sounds).

Here is a comparative chart.

Format1 second of audio
WAV 24-bit, 96 kHz, stereo 576 KB
WAV 16-bit, 44 kHz, mono 88 KB
WAV 16-bit, IMA-ADPCM, mono 22 KB
MP3 192 Kb/s, stereo 24 KB
Ogg Vorbis 128 Kb/s, stereo 16 KB
Ogg Vorbis 96 Kb/s, stereo 12 KB

Consider using WAV for short and repetitive sound effects, and Ogg Vorbis for music, speech, and long sound effects.

+ Recent posts