Sample Audio Files for Testing
Ready-made sound files for testing: upload and its limits, player behaviour, conversion and speech recognition. Sorted by sample rate, by duration and by weight: from eight kilohertz and fifty kilobytes to 96 kHz and half an hour of speech weighing 151 MB. If you need one specific format with all its quirks, the MP3 and WAV pages are linked below
By sample rate
By duration
By file size
🧠 Which sample rate to take
Sample rate is how many times per second the sound is measured. Human hearing tops out at roughly 20 kHz and the Nyquist theorem asks for double that, which is where the 44.1 kHz of the CD and of MP3 comes from.
Video and broadcasting settled on 48 kHz, so pick that one when the audio is going next to camera footage: the difference from 44.1 is not in quality but in the fact that a mismatch makes the pipeline resample the stream. Telephony lives at 8 kHz, speech recognition at 16 kHz, and 96 kHz is for editing with headroom for processing.
The weight of a WAV is arithmetic: sample rate × bit depth × channels × duration. On the chart the very same three seconds take anywhere from 47 KB to 563 KB, and stereo at 44.1 kHz outweighs mono at 48 kHz even though its rate is lower.