OGG to WAV

What this does

OGG plays in browsers, in games and in a handful of open-source players, and stops there. WAV plays in everything that edits audio. This is the conversion that gets an OGG into a DAW, a sampler or a piece of software that was written before Vorbis existed and never learned about it.

OGG Vorbis turns up in games, on Wikipedia, and in some messaging apps. Support outside those places is patchy, and audio software is where it runs out first.

What decoding does and does not give back

Converting an OGG to WAV decodes Vorbis back to raw samples. The file becomes large again — roughly 10 MB per minute at CD settings — and every editor can read it, seek in it instantly and process it without decoding on the fly. What it does not do is restore quality. Whatever the Vorbis encoder discarded is gone, and decoding cannot invent it. The gain is practical rather than sonic: further processing no longer stacks compression on compression, which matters when you are about to cut, stretch or filter the audio.

Nothing is uploaded

The conversion happens inside this page. Your file is read by the browser, converted here, and saved straight back to your downloads. It is never sent to a server, so there is no upload wait and no size cap beyond what your own device can hold.

Open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the network panel, and convert a file. You will see the converter itself download once, and no upload of your audio at all. That is the whole difference between this and a site that converts on a server, and what that difference actually means is worth a read.

The first conversion is slower

The converter is about 32 MB and downloads the first time you use it, which is the one moment this page is not instant. After that it is cached, and later conversions start immediately, even offline. So do later visits.

Questions