What causes Godot keeping uncompressed WAV audio in the export?

Long music tracks are kept as WAV (AudioStreamWAV), which is uncompressed PCM, so each minute of music costs about ten megabytes in the export.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Godot Keeping Uncompressed WAV Audio in the Export

Quick answer: Convert long music to Ogg Vorbis (AudioStreamOggVorbis) so it ships compressed, and keep only short, latency-sensitive SFX as WAV with appropriate import compression.

Godot imports WAV as uncompressed PCM, which is fine for short SFX but enormous for music. Using Ogg Vorbis for tracks compresses them to a small fraction of the WAV size with no audible loss for most listeners.

How to fix it

1. Convert music to Ogg Vorbis

Re-encode long tracks to .ogg and import them as AudioStreamOggVorbis, which Godot stores compressed, instead of shipping multi-megabyte WAVs.

2. Compress WAV SFX on import

For sound effects you keep as WAV, use the import dock to enable IMA-ADPCM or QOA compression so even short clips are smaller while staying low-latency.

3. Enable looping in the stream

Set loop points on the imported stream rather than duplicating audio to fake a loop, so a single compressed file covers seamless looping music.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Godot error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.