OGG is a container that almost always holds audio encoded with Vorbis, a compressed codec that, like MP3, throws away some audio information to reduce file size. WAV, on the other hand, is a container for raw, uncompressed PCM audio — no psychoacoustic modeling, no discarded frequencies, just the actual sample values written out directly. Converting OGG to WAV means decoding the compressed Vorbis stream back into those raw samples and saving them in WAV's simple, universally-readable format.
The main reason to do this is software compatibility during editing and production, not quality improvement. OGG Vorbis is the default export format for game engines like Unity and Godot, so a huge amount of game sound effects and music lives natively as .ogg files. Many digital audio workstations, older plugins, and some professional audio tools either don't read Vorbis directly or handle it inconsistently, while WAV is accepted everywhere without question. Converting lets you pull that game audio into Audacity, Reaper, Ableton, or a sample editor and work with it the same way you'd work with any other uncompressed source.
It's important to be clear about what decoding does and doesn't do. Unpacking Vorbis into PCM does not restore any audio information the original OGG encode threw away — once Vorbis compression discards a frequency or detail during encoding, that information is gone for good, and no amount of decoding brings it back. What you get is the honest, full-fidelity representation of what the OGG file actually contains, just in an uncompressed container instead of a compressed one. The practical trade is a WAV file roughly five to ten times larger in exchange for universal readability and a format safe to pass through further lossless processing (trimming, layering, pitch adjustment) without stacking on more lossy artifacts at each step.
The whole decode happens through FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, running locally in your browser tab, so game audio assets and personal recordings never have to be uploaded anywhere to be converted.
Need to go the other direction and compress a WAV back down for a game engine or smaller distribution? WAV to OGG handles that conversion.
