Convert WAV to OGG (Vorbis) Online
Convert uncompressed WAV to OGG Vorbis. Free, in your browser, no file uploads.
.wav · up to 100 MB
What you can do
Uncompressed WAV to OGG: maximum source quality
Lossless source
Converting from WAV (not from MP3) guarantees the maximum possible quality in the resulting OGG.
100% private
FFmpeg WebAssembly processes audio in your browser. Never uploaded to any server.
Patent-free
OGG Vorbis is royalty-free. Compatible with Unity, Unreal, Firefox, and Chrome without licenses.
Instant
No queues, no waiting. Direct conversion on your device.
How it works
Three steps, no hassle
Upload your WAV file
Drag or select your .wav file. Accepts 16-bit and 24-bit WAV, mono or stereo, any sample rate.
Select the Vorbis quality
Choose the quality level from -1 to 10 (quality 5-6 is the sweet spot for most uses). The process happens in your browser with FFmpeg WebAssembly.
Download the OGG
Get a compressed .ogg Vorbis file, ready for game engines (Unity, Unreal), web applications, or any compatible player.
FAQ
Got questions?
OGG Vorbis is competitive with or superior to MP3 and comparable to AAC in perceptual quality tests. Vorbis's quality scale goes from -1 to 10, where each level roughly corresponds to a variable bitrate range: quality 0 ≈ 64 kbps, quality 3 ≈ 112 kbps, quality 5 ≈ 160 kbps, quality 6 ≈ 192 kbps, quality 8 ≈ 256 kbps, quality 10 ≈ 500 kbps. In double-blind listening tests, Vorbis at quality 5 (≈160 kbps) is generally indistinguishable from the original audio for most listeners, a threshold that MP3 reaches at 192–256 kbps. Vorbis uses VBR (Variable Bitrate) as its native mode, allowing it to allocate more bits to complex passages and fewer to simple ones, maximizing perceptual quality per stored bit.
Converting from WAV (lossless format) to OGG Vorbis is the correct practice and has significant technical advantages over converting from MP3. WAV is uncompressed PCM audio: it represents audio samples as they are, without compression artifacts. When encoding WAV to Vorbis, the encoder works with pure audio and can make the best spectral quantization decisions without interference. In contrast, converting MP3 to OGG involves decoding the MP3 (recovering PCM with MP3's characteristic pre-echo, aliasing, and granularity artifacts) and passing it to the Vorbis encoder. The result is audio with accumulated artifacts from two compression stages. Music producers, sound designers, and game developers always keep source files in lossless formats (WAV, FLAC, AIFF) to generate all distribution formats from there.
The official Xiph.org specification guide recommends: quality -1 to 1 for low-quality voice and simple sound effects (32–80 kbps); quality 2–3 for high-quality voice and sound effects (80–112 kbps); quality 4–5 for standard-quality music (128–160 kbps); quality 6–7 for high-quality music (192–224 kbps); quality 8–9 for archival and distribution without storage constraints (256–320 kbps); quality 10 for maximum theoretical quality (≈500 kbps, rarely needed). For games with many simultaneous sound effects where cartridge or download storage matters, quality 4–5 is the industry standard. For background music in web applications, quality 5–6 offers an excellent listening experience with a reasonable file size.
It depends on the source WAV file's metadata. WAV uses two metadata systems: the RIFF INFO chunk (which can contain fields like INAM for track name, IART for artist, ICRD for date, IGNR for genre) and ID3 metadata embedded in some modern WAVs. OGG Vorbis uses Vorbis Comment as its metadata system, a free-text UTF-8 system with field=value pairs. FFmpeg attempts to map available WAV metadata to the Vorbis Comment format during conversion, but the mapping is not perfect for non-standard fields. Basic metadata like title, artist, album, and year are correctly preserved in most cases. For professional audio files with extensive metadata (BWF/BEXT chunk for broadcast production), reviewing the resulting OGG's metadata is recommended.
Yes, with important nuances depending on the ecosystem. Chrome (since version 3, 2009), Firefox (since version 3.5, 2009), Edge (since version 79, 2020 with the new Chromium engine), and Opera all support OGG Vorbis natively in HTML5's <audio> element and in the Web Audio API. However, Safari on macOS and iOS does NOT natively support OGG Vorbis in any version (as of 2025), which represents a problem for 18–20% of mobile web traffic in many markets. For web applications with universal support, the standard solution is to offer multiple formats: HTML5's <audio> element accepts multiple <source> elements in order of preference. Major web audio libraries (Howler.js, Tone.js, Pizzicato) automatically manage fallback between OGG and MP3/AAC based on browser capability.
Yes, OGG Vorbis is completely free of patents and royalties, and was explicitly designed with this goal. Vorbis was developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, founded in 2000 by Monty Montgomery. Xiph.Org is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing patent-free multimedia formats. Why patent freedom matters: MP3 was subject to Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson Multimedia patents until 2017, meaning browsers, players, and distributors needed to pay licenses to decode MP3. AAC remains subject to patents until approximately 2028–2031 (depending on jurisdiction). OGG Vorbis has never had royalties: any project can implement a Vorbis encoder/decoder without paying anything. This is why Wikipedia uses OGG Vorbis for its audio files, why open-source game engines like Godot Engine use it as a native format, and why it was the standard audio format in Android before the adoption of Opus.
Convert WAV to OGG Vorbis: the lossless source advantage
OGG Vorbis is a lossy audio compression format developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The format has two components: OGG is the container (defined in RFC 3533, published in 2003), a general-purpose, patent-free multimedia container format; Vorbis is the audio codec, originally developed by Chris Montgomery (known as 'Monty') and released as stable version 1.0 in 2002. The Vorbis I specification was published by Xiph.Org and is freely implementable: any developer can create a Vorbis encoder or decoder without paying royalties or signing license agreements. This contrasts with MP3 (patented until 2017) and AAC (patented until approximately 2028–2031 depending on country). Vorbis uses a coding architecture based on MDCT (Modified Discrete Cosine Transform) with variable-length windows (short 256-sample blocks for transients, long 2048-sample blocks for stationary audio), vector quantization of the spectrum, and Huffman coding of the quantizations. Vorbis's quality system is unique: instead of specifying a target bitrate (as in MP3), a quality level from -1 to 10 is specified that controls the perceptual distortion ratio. The encoder adjusts the bitrate dynamically based on content complexity, using more bits when audio is complex and fewer when it is simple. This is native VBR (Variable Bitrate), which maximizes perceptual quality per unit of storage.
The advantage of converting from WAV (rather than from MP3 or another lossy format) is technically significant. WAV stores audio in uncompressed PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) format: each audio sample is directly represented as a 16, 24, or 32-bit integer. There is no frequency transform process, no spectral quantization, no elimination of information of any kind. The PCM audio in a WAV is identical to the signal coming from the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). When encoding this pure audio to Vorbis, the encoder has access to all the information in the original signal and can make optimal spectral quantization decisions based on the psychoacoustic model. In the video game and interactive audio industry, OGG Vorbis is the de facto standard format. Unity 3D has supported OGG Vorbis as one of its main audio formats since its early versions (2005) and imports and internally transcodes it during the build process. Unreal Engine uses OGG Vorbis for its streaming audio system. Godot Engine uses OGG Vorbis as one of its two native audio formats (alongside WAV for low-latency audio). In the web ecosystem, the Web Audio API (standardized by the W3C in 2015) supports OGG Vorbis decoding in all browsers except Safari. The reason for the lack of support in Safari is primarily historical: Apple has its own audio format ecosystem (AAC, ALAC) and has prioritized its proprietary formats.
The technical process of converting WAV to OGG Vorbis with FFmpeg involves several steps: (1) demuxing the WAV container to extract the PCM audio stream; (2) decoding the PCM (in the case of WAV compressed with ADPCM or GSM, although pure PCM WAV requires no actual decoding); (3) resampling if the WAV's sample rate is not supported by the Vorbis encoder (Vorbis supports frequencies from 8 kHz to 192 kHz, so in practice any standard WAV works without resampling); (4) encoding to Vorbis with the specified quality level; (5) muxing into the OGG container. For sound production and video game projects, workflow management is important. Professional practice is to keep all audio assets in WAV or FLAC format (lossless formats) in the master asset repository and generate distribution formats (OGG, MP3, AAC) as part of the build or export pipeline. Tools like FMOD Studio, Wwise, and Unity's own import system perform this conversion automatically when processing assets. For direct web distribution, OGG at quality 5–6 offers an optimal balance: file size 60–70% smaller than the original WAV with perceptually transparent quality for most listeners under normal listening conditions.