How big will the session be, and will the stems fit? Enter a length and a format to get the bitrate, the file size and how much audio a drive holds.
Uncompressed audio stores every sample: its bitrate is sample rate × bit depth × channels. CD audio — 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo, as the Red Book standard (IEC 60908) defines it — is 1,411.2 kbit/s, about 10.6 MB a minute. MP3 and AAC are given a bitrate directly, so a 320 kbit/s file takes 2.4 MB a minute whatever the music. Sizes are in megabytes of a million bytes, as drives are sold, with mebibytes (2²⁰ bytes) alongside; the few dozen bytes of a file's header are left out.
Why does my computer show a smaller number?
Some systems count a megabyte as 1,048,576 bytes (a mebibyte). The MiB figure under the main
size is that number.
Is a WAV file over 4 GB a problem?
Classic WAV stores sizes in 32 bits, so most programs cannot write a single WAV larger than
4 GB; long multichannel recordings use RF64/BWF-64 or are split. The calculator shows when
you are near that size.
What about FLAC?
FLAC is lossless but compressed, and how much it saves depends on the music, so its size
cannot be calculated from the settings alone. Use the WAV size as the upper limit.