Audio File Size Calculator

Uncompressed PCM audio stores every sample at full bit depth — no psychoacoustic compression. File size in bytes equals sample rate × (bit depth ÷ 8) × channel count × duration in seconds. Sample rate is how many snapshots per second (44,100 for CD, 48,000 for video post). Bit depth is bits per sample per channel; divide by eight to get bytes per sample. Multiply by channels for stereo, then by length to get total storage.

CD-quality stereo is 44.1 kHz, 16-bit — about 10.1 MB per minute. Video and film workflows standardize on 48 kHz; music mastering often records 24-bit or 32-bit float for headroom even when delivery is 16-bit. This calculator is for raw WAV, AIFF, and BWF budgeting — not MP3, AAC, or FLAC, where bitrate tables govern size instead of sample math.

Duration is entered in minutes for convenience; the compute step converts to seconds internally. Mono halves channel storage versus stereo at the same rate and depth. Doubling sample rate from 48 kHz to 96 kHz doubles file size linearly — there is no compression benefit in PCM.

Worked example with the default fields: 48 kHz sample rate, 24-bit depth, stereo, 3 minutes duration. Bytes per sample = 24 ÷ 8 = 3. Per second: 48,000 × 3 × 2 = 288,000 bytes. Over 180 seconds (3 × 60): 51,840,000 bytes — shown as about 51.84 MB. Per minute divides evenly to roughly 17.28 MB/min at these settings.

Use these numbers when planning external drive space for multitrack sessions. A rock album with 24 tracks at 5 minutes each, 48 kHz / 24-bit stereo, is roughly 24 × 5 × 17.28 MB ≈ 2 GB before edits and backups. Podcast mono voice at 44.1 kHz / 16-bit is about 5 MB/min — an hour lands near 300 MB.

Common mistakes include confusing kilobits per second (kbps) from lossy codecs with kilobytes from PCM, forgetting that float32 still occupies four bytes per sample in many DAW exports, and estimating project size from mixed stereo bounce size when the session contains dozens of mono tracks. Always multiply by track count for raw multitrack estimates.

Headroom bit depths (24-bit, 32-bit float) do not increase playback loudness — they reduce quantization noise when processing. Archival masters warrant higher depth; final CD redbook remains 16-bit after dithered export. Match your calculator inputs to the file format you actually write to disk.

Limits: this ignores WAV/AIFF header bytes (negligible for long files), RF64 multi-gigabyte containers, and compressed formats. It assumes continuous PCM with no silence stripping. Network upload estimates should add 5–10% overhead for filesystem block size and metadata sidecars.