AudioMundo

A plain-language reference desk for sound, audio formats, and levels

A plain-language reference desk for sound, audio formats, and levels

AudioMundo is a reference site for the vocabulary of recorded sound. Audio is full of numbers that look interchangeable and are not: decibels, LUFS, kilobits per second, kilohertz, ohms. Each answers a different question, and spec sheets rarely stop to explain which one. The pages here take one term or one question at a time — what a decibel measures, what LUFS adds that dBFS misses, whether FLAC really loses nothing, what 44.1 kHz and 16-bit mean — and answer it in a few hundred words, with links to the standards bodies and government references that define the terms.

The site's working tool is the bitrate and file-size converter: enter a figure in kilobits per second, megabytes per hour, or gigabytes per hour, and read off the equivalents. It answers the most common practical question in this subject — how much space an hour of audio at a given bitrate actually occupies — without a spreadsheet.

Everything here is definitional and descriptive. Where a question turns personal — your hearing, your ears, your exposure — the pages point to the primary references at NIDCD and the WHO and to hearing professionals, not to a verdict from us.

Audio Bitrate and File-Size Converter

Convert between the units used to describe audio data: kilobits per second (how encoders and streaming specs state bitrate), kilobytes per second (how download meters state it), and megabytes or gigabytes per hour (how your storage fills up). Enter a value in any unit and read the equivalents. Example: a 320 kbps file consumes 144 MB per hour.

Figures use decimal (SI) units: 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes. Operating systems that report in binary units (MiB, GiB) will show slightly smaller numbers for the same file. Actual file sizes also include container overhead and metadata, and variable-bitrate encodings will differ from their nominal rate.