ID:278064
 
Okay I decided to get this on BYOND records :) What I did was I took an audio file, War Noise.wav, and converted it into different audio formats and wrote down their respective file sizes. This is basically to shed some light on what formats are what sizes in general. Also to tell those without an audio converter which format(s) they should download.

Original file specs
File: War Noise
Format: .wav
Size: 7,930,614 bytes
Size on disk: 7,933,952 bytes
Length: 45 seconds
Downloaded from: http://www.freesound.org

Converted formats and sizes
.mp3
- Size: 719,726 bytes
- Size on disk: 720,896 bytes

.flac
- Size: 4,913,912 bytes
- Size on disk: 4,915,200 bytes

.wma
- Size: 734,093 bytes
- Size on disk: 737,280 bytes

.ogg
- Size: 678,363 bytes
- Size on disk: 679,936 bytes

.m4a
- Size: 687,422 bytes
- Size on disk: 688,128 bytes

Warning! Results might vary from computer to computer!

Are there any other audio file formats people want me to test? :)

EDIT
Edited the "experiment" o.O .mp3 is still generally smaller than .wma. Ha.
I want to see it start with a typical large .wav file. Maybe a 30 second ambient sound effect or something.
m3u is a playlist file, so ... you didn't really encode anything there. I'd like to see flac too, along with the kind of test data Foomer suggested.
In response to Foomer
Unfortunately, I don't have the means to create the sound file. I just took a random audio file; in this case I used a song by (hed) pe :) then right clicked on the completed conversion file(s) and wrote down their size (in bytes obviously).

- .wav added to the list
In response to Spunky_Girl
Download some .wav clips from freesound then. (http://www.freesound.org/)
In response to Stephen001
I'd like to see it start from FLAC and go into everything else from FLAC.

You can't convert from a lossy format to a lossy format and expect proper results. Also, what bitrates was the OP using for mp3?
In response to Foomer
There. I used a .wav to start with. ^-^
In response to Foomer
Foomer wrote:
I want to see it start with a typical large .wav file. Maybe a 30 second ambient sound effect or something.

Wav files, being uncompressed, are not variable in size. You can figure the estimated size for typical file by taking total bytes divided by length in seconds, for bytes per second. The size will vary depending on the exact wav format you use, (16khz, 22khz, 16bit, 32bit, etc).

MP3 files will vary largely on the source sound, since these are compressed, similar to how, say, a jpg is compressed.
In response to Jerico2day
I'm surprised how small FLAC is, especially since it's a lossless format.
In response to Flame Sage
You consider .flac small ?
.m4a, or .mp4 (like .mkv and others), is just a container format, not so much a data format. You're not actually saying which format you're using the compress the audio there, as a container can contain audio and video of arbitrary formats. That's like answering with "avi" when asked for the video format. :P

EDIT: Also, might as well mention listing the size on the disk each file takes is of course pretty useless, since it isn't the actual file's size and won't even stay consistent between partitions. >_>
One useful piece of info is how music file sizes compare, but that's kind of difficult to compare. Ideally your game music should be in a module format, which sounds way better (and more consistent) than MIDI and supports looping. In most cases a module-format song is going to be much smaller than an equivalent .mp3 or .ogg, but you can't really convert from those to module formats. A MIDI will be smaller still.

Lummox JR
In response to Lummox JR
Ah, I forgot about .midi. I'll add that to the list.

EDIT
Awe, it appears I don't have the option to convert into midi files on my audio file converter. Sorry.
In response to Spunky_Girl
MIDI stores music only, and it stores it like sheet music (other formats store any sound as a waveform), so it's not surprising. The benefit is that it's extremely small, the drawback is that it sounds slightly different on each sound card.
In response to Andre-g1
It's loss less, so the 3,000,000 byte drop isn't that bad. I'd consider it small for a loss less format!