File Format for Sounds

Godot supports three file formats: wav, mp3, and ogg.

The wav format is uncompressed; it takes a lot of space but has the highest quality.

The mp3 format was popular in the 1990s and is still used today. It's a compressed audio format, which loses some quality compared to wav.

The ogg format is also a compressed audio format, similar to mp3, but generally has better sound quality for lower file sizes. It is more often used traditionally in the open source community because mp3 was proprietary for a long time.

Each format has different tradeoffs: some are smaller, some have better sound quality, and some take more processing power to decompress.

Generally, you should pick:

• ogg if you care most about file size, but it will use more CPU to decompress. Generally, that's what you want.
• wav if you have storage space but care most about decompression CPU usage, for example on very low-powered devices.
• mp3 is somewhere in the middle; not as compressed as ogg, but also not as CPU intensive.