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How much space does an hour of 48 kHz, 24-bit WAV use?
Published by Take & Track
An hour of 48 kHz stereo with packed 24-bit PCM samples contains 1,036,800,000 bytes of audio, or 1.0368 GB. Mono contains 518,400,000 bytes. The saved WAV file also includes a header and may include other chunks.
Build the number one second at a time
A packed 24-bit sample takes three bytes. At each sampling instant the stereo file stores one sample from the left and one from the right, making six bytes. Multiply six by 48,000 sampling instants per second and you get 288,000 bytes per second. Multiply by 3600 seconds for the hour.
The same stereo file is about 0.966 GiB because a GiB contains 1,073,741,824 bytes. A display using decimal GB divides by 1,000,000,000. Before assuming a copy has been truncated, look at the byte counts and playing times.
Check what the recorder actually writes
The calculation uses the stored sample container. A 24-bit signal saved in a 32-bit container takes four bytes per channel per instant. One hour of that stereo format totals 1.3824 GB before overhead. The same four-byte count also applies to 32-bit float recordings.
Make a 60-second test using the settings for the session. With packed 24-bit stereo, expect about 17.28 MB of audio. A substantially different result is a reason to inspect the codec, channel count, duration and stored bit depth. An MP3 or FLAC recording needs a different estimate because it uses compression.