Importing Audio Files

Learn how to create Sound Wave assets by importing audio files.

Unreal Engine provides several features for you to create the desired audio for your project. Sound Wave assets are representations of audio files and are one of the basic building blocks required to work with many of those features. You can create Sound Waves by importing audio files into the Unreal Editor.

Supported Audio Files

Format

.wav, .ogg, .flac, .aif

Bit Depth

16, 24 (Windows)

Sample Rate

Any

Speaker Channels

Mono, Stereo, 4.0, 5.1, 7.1

All imported audio files are converted to 16-bit .wav files internally. As such, exporting (by right-clicking a Sound Wave and selecting Asset Actions > Export...) will produce the converted file and not the originally imported file. Additionally, 24-bit files are not dithered during conversion so importing 16-bit files is recommended.

How to Import an Audio File

  1. In the Content Browser, click the Import button.

    Content Browser Import Button

  2. Select the file you wish to import using the File Explorer.

  3. Find the newly created Sound Wave asset.

    Content Browser Imported Sound Wave

  4. To preview the Sound Wave, hover over it until a Play/Stop toggle button appears and click it.

    Play Sound Wave Stop Sound Wave

  5. Double-click the Sound Wave to open the Details panel. You can view and edit the properties of your asset here.

    Sound Wave Details Panel

You can also import audio files by dragging them from Windows Explorer directly into the Content Browser.

Unreal Engine also supports importing first-order ambisonic files. See Native Soundfield Ambisonics Rendering for information on importing and using ambisonic assets.

Compression

All audio assets are compressed with the Default Audio Compression Type specified in the Project Settings. You can change this to suit your project's needs.

  • Bink Audio: A perceptual-based codec which supports all features across all platforms. This is the default option.

  • ADPCM: A time-domain codec that has fixed-sized quality and a compression ratio around 4x, but is relatively cheap to decode.

  • PCM: Uses uncompressed audio which results in higher memory usage as streamed chunks contain less audio per chunk, but provides extremely cheap decoding and support for all features.

  • Platform Specific: Encodes the asset in a platform-specific format. Seeking is not supported.