AU to OGG Converter

Convert AU to OGG Online

Move a legacy Sun .au (or .snd) recording into OGG, the open Xiph.Org container that game engines, open-source tooling, and the modern web understand. By default this encodes to Vorbis — the royalty-free, patent-free codec that .ogg is best known for — turning a Unix-workstation relic with no metadata and patchy player support into a small, taggable, widely-decoded file. One honest catch matters here, and it depends entirely on what is inside your .au: see the table below.

How to Convert AU to OGG

1. Upload Your AU File: Drag and drop your .au or .snd file onto the page, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Sun/SPARCstation system sounds, early Java applet audio, and old Unix speech archives all work, and you can queue several at once.
2. Pick a Quality Preset: The output stays on the Vorbis codec by default. Open Advanced Options and choose a Quality Preset (Highest down to Lowest), or switch to Variable Bitrate, Constant Bitrate, or Custom Bitrate to set an exact value — Vorbis VBR runs from 48K up to 384K.
3. Set Audio Channel, Audio Sample Rate, or Trim (Optional): Leave Audio Channel and Audio Sample Rate on "Original" to copy the source layout, or downmix to mono and lower the rate for a smaller file. Use Trim (start time plus duration) to keep only part of a longer recording.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save your .ogg file individually or as a ZIP. No sign-up, no watermark.

What Vorbis Can and Cannot Do With Your AU Source

AU files come in two very different flavors, and the result of the conversion depends on which one you have. Vorbis is lossy: it re-encodes efficiently but never adds detail the original capture lacked.

Not sure which flavor you have? Run ffprobe file.au or open VLC's Codec Information panel: "pcm_mulaw" or an 8000 Hz / mono signature means telephone-grade; "pcm_s16be" or higher means linear PCM and the good case.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will converting my AU file to OGG improve the sound quality?

No, and the reason depends on what is inside the AU. If it holds the classic 8-bit µ-law or A-law audio (Sun's telephone-companded default at 8 kHz mono), Vorbis reproduces that intelligibility but cannot restore highs or dynamic range the compander discarded when the file was first recorded. If it holds linear PCM (16/24/32-bit), you get a clean first-generation Vorbis encode of an effectively lossless master — that is the case where OGG shines. Either way you keep what you had; encoding never adds detail the original capture lacked.

Should I encode the OGG with Vorbis or Opus?

For most uses of the .ogg extension, Vorbis (the default here) is the safe pick — it is the codec game engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot ship audio in, and the format you find across Minecraft, World of Warcraft, GTA: San Andreas, and Spotify's library. Opus, the newer Xiph/IETF codec from 2012, is technically more efficient at every bitrate and is the better choice for fresh voice or streaming work; if that is your target, use AU to Opus instead. Stick with Vorbis when you specifically need a .ogg file that drops into existing open-source tooling and game pipelines.

Is converting an old Unix AU to OGG actually worth it?

Yes, more so than most legacy conversions. This is a real modernization rather than swapping one dated wrapper for another: a Sun/NeXT workstation relic carrying audio/basic with no metadata and limited player support becomes OGG/Vorbis, an open, royalty-free format the web and game tooling actively use. You gain efficient compression, tagging, and broad current-software support in exchange for a file the modern ecosystem understands.

I want to keep a lossless archive — is OGG the right target?

No. Vorbis is lossy and discards some data by design, so it is the wrong target for preservation. If your .au holds linear PCM and you care about a true master, keep the original .au or convert to AU to WAV for an uncompressed copy, or AU to FLAC for lossless compression with tagging — all three preserve every sample exactly. Reach for OGG/Vorbis when you want a small, modern, shareable file rather than an editing or archival master. For a µ-law AU there is little to preserve beyond the speech itself, so a low-bitrate Vorbis file is usually all you need.

Can I convert the OGG back to AU later?

Yes — OGG to AU reverses the direction. Remember it is not a round-trip to the original quality, though: once audio has been through Vorbis encoding, converting back to AU rebuilds the .au container around the already-lossy audio and cannot recover detail Vorbis dropped. Keep your source .au if you may need the original fidelity, and use AU to MP3 when you simply need the audio to play on nearly any device.

How are my files handled, and how long do you keep them?

Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours after conversion — never shared, never made public, with no sign-up and no watermark. In our testing, a 60-second 16-bit/44.1 kHz stereo PCM AU (about 10 MB) encoded to a 128K Vorbis OGG near 0.9 MB with no audible loss, while a 60-second 8 kHz µ-law AU re-encoded to a 64 kbps mono OGG at full speech intelligibility.