I used to be able to save little 2 second long sound clips in .wav format and they’d only take up about 30kbs. But now when I go to save, 2 second clips are always 300kbs! That’s a big increase! I tried choosing “Other Uncompressed Files” and picking “Unsigned 8-bit PCM” from the options when exporting, the lowest it’ll go down to is 155kbs.
Please help!
WAV format is an “uncompressed” PCM file format.
The file size in “bits” can be calculated like this:
“duration (seconds)” x “number of channels” x “bits per sample” x “samples per second”.
To convert to “bytes” divide the result by 8.
So for example:
3 seconds for a mono track (1 channel) 16 bit at 11 kHz:
3 x 1 x 16 x 11000 = 528000 bits = 66000 bytes or about 64.5 kB.
3 seconds for a mono track (1 channel) 8 bit at 8 kHz:
3 x 1 x 8 x 8000 = 192000 bits = 24000 bytes or about 23.4 kB
Note that the sound quality of an 8 bit format 8kHz sample rate WAV file is rubbish. That’s why compressed audio formats such as MP3 and OGG were invented.
3 seconds of reasonable quality mono speech in MP3 format can be under 10 kB (try 24 kbps Constant Bit Rate).