Skip to content

Sound storage

With a sound file, we can measure a few things:

  • The sample rate - how many samples we take per second.
  • The bit depth - how many bits we use to store each sample’s amplitude
  • The number of channels - whether it’s mono (1 channel) or stereo (2 channels), etc.
  • The duration of the sound - how long the sound file is (in seconds).

If we multiply all of those together, we can calculate how much storage the sound file takes up (in bits):

For example, if we have a stereo sound file (2 channels) with a sample rate of 44,100 samples per second, a bit depth of 16 bits, and a duration of 3 minutes (180 seconds), then the storage used would be:

To find that in megabytes, we can do megabytes. So that sound file would take up about 31.752 megabytes of storage if it was uncompressed.