How big should my final wav. files be?

[keenan123]

I was just wondering how large my final (mastered) files should be. The current song im working on is about 5 mins long and it is 56mb, which i thought was rather large considering the average song on a cd is about 10mb.

[Dot]

depends on the sample rate you do your project, 56mb seems about right in 48k, CD format is 44.1k but im pretty sure 5 min song on cd is still around 40mb not 10 as you claim

[Emcha_audio]

Don't confuse 10mb after ripping a cd into a mp3 format, compared to a wave file.

[mjslakeridge]

Each sample is 2 bytes. So at cd quality (44.1khz, 16 bit), the calculation would be as follows:
44,100 (samples per second) x 2 (bytes) x 60 (seconds) x 5 (minutes) x 2 (stereo track) =52,920,000 or about 53MB.

A 16 bit sample is 2 bytes. A 24 bit sample would be 3 bytes.

[mesaone]

Size scales with samplerate and bit depth. A five-minute CD track should be 50.5 MB.

For example, a 24-bit 44.1 kHz WAV file will be 150% the size of a CD track of equal length (24-bit is 150% of the information of 16-bit).

Another example, a 96 kHz WAV file will be double the size of a 48 kHz WAV file of equal length and bit depth (96 kHz is double the information of 48 kHz).

If you want to know the approximate size of an audio file, check out this calculator. http://www.sounddevices.com/calculator/