Game dev & streaming

Indie Game Audio File Size Estimator

Free indie game dev audio size estimator. Enter minutes of voice / music, target format, sample rate, and bit depth; outputs total uncompressed and compressed MB / GB, with storage warnings for mobile deployments.

Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software · Changes and corrections

When to use this

Use during pre-production to budget your final build size. Indie mobile games and itch.io uploads have hard size limits.

How it compares

Audacity and other DAWs report file size after encoding. This tool estimates before.

Enter your values below. Calculations run locally as you type.

Audio asset

Minutes of audio Format Sample rate (Hz) Bit depth Channels

File-size estimate

Total

302.8 MB

30 min of WAV

Per minute

10.09 MB

WAV at this length is huge — consider OGG or Opus.

How it works

WAV bytes = seconds × sample rate × (bit depth ÷ 8) × channels.

Compressed formats are estimated as a fraction of WAV — MP3 ≈ 8%, OGG ≈ 7%, Opus ≈ 5%.

Use the estimate to budget your final build size before encoding.

FAQs

When should I use OGG?

For looping music and ambience. OGG handles seamless loops better than MP3 at similar bitrates.

Is 22 kHz too low?

Fine for most sound effects and for voice, since 22.05 kHz still reproduces everything up to about 11 kHz; music and bright effects lose noticeable top end. 44.1 kHz is the safe default for music.

How is uncompressed WAV size calculated?

Multiply sample rate by bit depth by number of channels by seconds, then divide by 8 to get bytes. For example, stereo 44.1 kHz 16-bit audio is about 10.1 MB per minute.

Should music and voice use the same settings?

Not usually. Music benefits from a full 44.1 kHz sample rate to preserve high frequencies, while voice often sounds fine at 22 kHz mono, which roughly halves the file size.

Worked example

Input

30 minutes, OGG, 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, stereo.

Output

~21.2 MB total (~0.71 MB/minute).

WAV would be 30 × 60 × 44100 × 2 × 2 = 317,520,000 bytes, which the tool shows as ~302.8 MB (it counts 1 MB as 1,048,576 bytes). OGG ratio ~7% → ~21.2 MB.

Common pitfalls

Compressed sizes are a fixed fraction of a 44.1 kHz-style WAV, not a bitrate: at 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo, MP3 ≈ 113 kbps and OGG ≈ 99 kbps; Opus at 48 kHz ≈ 77 kbps. For a chosen bitrate, bytes = kbps × 1,000 ÷ 8 × seconds.
Repeated SFX in many channels stack; budget per unique asset.
24-bit audio is rarely necessary in games — drop to 16-bit unless you have a strong reason.

Uncompressed audio size is pure arithmetic

File size for uncompressed PCM is sample rate times bit depth times channels times duration. At the CD-standard defaults — 44,100 Hz, 16-bit, stereo — that is about 10.6 MB per minute, so 30 minutes is well over 300 MB before any compression.

Every one of those four terms is a straight multiplier. Dropping to mono halves it; 22,050 Hz halves it again. That is why sound effects are frequently mono at reduced rates while music stays stereo.

Choosing formats per asset type, not per project

Different assets want different handling. Short, frequently triggered sound effects are usually kept uncompressed or lightly compressed, because decoding cost is paid on every play and latency matters. Long music tracks are compressed and streamed, because size dominates and the decode is amortised.

Sample rate should follow content: 48 kHz costs about 9% more than 44.1 kHz, and 88.2 or 96 kHz doubles storage for detail that is inaudible in most game audio, while dialogue and many effects are perfectly acceptable at lower rates. Choosing per asset rather than setting one project-wide standard is where most of the saving is.

Related tools