Where OGG files come from
Most people meet OGG through a messaging app. WhatsApp voice notes are OGG files with Opus audio inside, and when you save or export one from a chat it often arrives with a .ogg or .opus name. Telegram voice messages use the same approach. The format shows up in a few other places too.
- Games: many PC and mobile games store music and sound effects as OGG, and modders and sound designers pull those files out to listen to or reuse.
- Linux: desktop sound recorders and screen recorders on Linux often default to OGG, and much of the open-source audio world uses it because the format is free of patents.
- Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons: pronunciation clips and other audio there are published as OGG.
- Audacity and other editors: OGG is a common export option, so a friend may have sent you a mix in it.
Vorbis or Opus: what is inside the .ogg
OGG is a container, and it can hold one of two audio codecs. Vorbis is the older one and is what games and Linux recordings usually contain. Opus is newer, works well for speech at small file sizes, and is what WhatsApp and Telegram voice messages use. Files that end in .opus are the same container with Opus inside.
You do not need to know which one you have. The converter reads both, decodes the audio and encodes it with the LAME MP3 encoder at a constant bitrate. The output keeps the original file name with .mp3 on the end.
Both Vorbis and Opus are lossy, and so is MP3, so the conversion loses a little more detail on top of what the original encoder already removed. For a voice note or a game effect that difference is hard to hear. What you should not expect is an MP3 that sounds better than the OGG it came from, whatever bitrate you choose.
Devices and apps that will not open OGG
OGG support is patchy outside the open-source world. Apple's built-in players on iPhone and Mac, many car stereos, older portable players and a good number of editing and presentation apps either refuse the file or play silence. Upload forms on course platforms and transcription or podcast services often list MP3, WAV and M4A but leave OGG out.
MP3 is the one format that nearly everything accepts. Converting once and keeping the MP3 is usually simpler than hunting for a player that handles OGG on each device you own. If you need an uncompressed file for editing instead, a WAV is the better choice, and the WAV pages on this site do that in the same way.
Choosing a bitrate
The converter offers 128, 192 or 320 kbps, with 192 as the default. The right choice depends on what is in the file.
- 128 kbps: enough for a voice note, a voice message or a spoken recording. Speech sounds fine at 64 to 128 kbps, and 128 is the lowest setting offered, so it is also the smallest file at roughly 1 MB per minute.
- 192 kbps: a good general setting for game music, podcasts with music beds and anything you want to keep around. About 1.4 MB per minute.
- 320 kbps: for music where you want to keep as much as possible of what the OGG holds. About 2.4 MB per minute. It cannot add detail that was not in the source, so for a voice note it only makes a bigger file.
Your file never leaves your device
The converter is FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly and runs inside your browser. The OGG is never uploaded, and nothing is stored on our side. On first use the browser downloads the conversion engine, about 32 MB, once and caches it, after which the converter also works offline. That matters for voice messages, which are often private.
It converts one file at a time, with no limit on how many you convert and no sign-up or watermark. Files up to about 2 GB work on a computer; phones and tablets manage less because of browser memory limits, though voice notes and game sounds are tiny by comparison. The MP3 lives only in the open tab until you press Download, and reloading the page clears it. Only local files are accepted, so links do not work. It runs in current Chrome, Edge and Firefox, and Safari 16 or newer.
If you actually need the words
Many people convert a voice note because they want to read it rather than play it. After the conversion, a Transcribe this file button sends the MP3 into the transcription box further down this page. Transcription runs on our servers, so that step does upload the file. You get a timestamped, editable transcript in 90+ languages, with export to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT or CSV, and it is free to try without an account. You can also upload the OGG directly on the OGG to text page without converting at all.