Game Audio Formats: OGG vs WAV vs MP3 — Which to Use in Unity, UE5, Godot

## Game Audio Formats: The Complete Guide Audio is one of the most overlooked aspects of game optimization. Using the wrong format can double your game's memory usage or cause sound effects to stutter during loading. ## OGG Vorbis — The Universal Game Format OGG is the go-to format for music and long audio in most games. It uses lossy compression (like MP3) but is open-source with no licensing fees. - ✅ Smaller file size than WAV - ✅ Free, no royalties - ✅ Excellent quality at 128-192 kbps - ✅ Streams efficiently (no full decompression before play) - ❌ Slight CPU overhead for decompression **Best for:** Background music, ambient sounds, long audio tracks ## WAV — The Lossless Choice WAV is uncompressed audio — perfect quality, large file size. Game engines decompress OGG to WAV in memory anyway, so for short sounds it makes sense to ship as WAV. - ✅ Perfect quality, no decompression - ✅ No latency — ideal for short sound effects - ✅ Universal support - ❌ Large file size **Best for:** Short sound effects (footsteps, UI clicks, gunshots) ## MP3 — Web and UE5 MP3 has licensing considerations (now mostly expired) and slightly worse quality than OGG at the same bitrate. Unreal Engine uses WAV natively but accepts MP3 for import. ## Quick Reference by Engine | Engine | Music | SFX | Notes | |--------|-------|-----|-------| | **Unity** | OGG | WAV | OGG streams, WAV decompresses in RAM | | **Unreal Engine 5** | WAV | WAV | UE5 converts to its own format on import | | **Godot** | OGG | WAV | OGG for looping, WAV for one-shots | | **Phaser/Web** | OGG + MP3 | OGG + MP3 | Provide both for browser compatibility | ## Convert Audio for Your Game Engine Use the [ToolPix Game Audio Converter](/tools/audio-game-converter) to convert any audio file (MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, M4A) to the format your engine needs: 1. Upload your audio file 2. Select output format (OGG for Unity/Godot, WAV for UE5) 3. Choose bitrate (128 kbps is fine for most game audio) 4. Select Mono for sound effects to save memory, Stereo for music 5. Download the converted file ## Optimization Tips - Use Mono for all positional/3D sounds — stereo wastes memory on sounds the engine will pan anyway - 44100 Hz is standard — you can use 22050 Hz for short SFX to halve the file size - Normalize your audio to -6 dBFS to prevent clipping when multiple sounds play together ## Related Tools - [Video to MP3](/tools/video-to-mp3) — extract audio from video files - [Audio Converter](/tools/m4a-to-mp3) — general audio conversion