Convert BNK to OGG

Game sound banks saved as .bnk cannot usually be opened by audio editors, players, or modding tools. Extracting their playable audio as .ogg is useful when a target tool requires Ogg Vorbis or when individual sounds must be previewed and edited.

What a BNK file contains

.bnk is not one universal audio format. It most commonly identifies an Audiokinetic Wwise SoundBank used by games, although unrelated programs can use the same extension. A Wwise bank stores sound-event data, object metadata, and sometimes embedded media; it may instead reference separate .wem audio files in the game installation.

Wwise media can use Vorbis, Opus, PCM, ADPCM, or platform-specific codecs. A bank containing only event definitions or references cannot produce audio without its matching external .wem files. Wwise banks commonly start with the BKHD signature and are often found in folders such as SoundBanks, StreamingAssets, or GeneratedSoundBanks.

If the file does not come from a Wwise-based game, identify its originating program before converting it. Renaming the extension does not change the file format, and a decoder for one type of BNK file will not necessarily open another.

What an OGG file is

Ogg is a container format. In this context, an .ogg file normally contains Ogg Vorbis audio, which is supported by VLC, foobar2000, Audacity, many game engines, and Linux-based software. It is substantially smaller than uncompressed WAV, but Vorbis is lossy.

Confirm that the receiving application accepts Ogg Vorbis, not merely files with an .ogg extension. Ogg can also carry Opus, FLAC, and other codecs, which some applications reject even though the filename is still .ogg.

Extracting Wwise BNK audio

Use vgmstream to inspect and decode supported Wwise media. It handles many WEM codecs that generic audio converters do not recognize. For banks with embedded audio or complex metadata, use wwiser to inspect the bank and extract its embedded WEM files, then decode the extracted WEM files with vgmstream.

1. Keep the original .bnk file and any matching .wem files. Do not edit or replace game assets while extracting them.
2. Try inspecting the bank with vgmstream:
   vgmstream-cli -m game.bnk
   If it reports streams, decode each available subsong. For example:
   vgmstream-cli -s 1 -o track-01.wav game.bnk
3. If vgmstream cannot open the bank, or the bank references external media, use wwiser's extraction functions to obtain embedded .wem files and locate the game's external WEM files. Then decode each file:
   vgmstream-cli -o track-01.wav sound_123.wem
4. Encode the decoded WAV as Ogg Vorbis with FFmpeg:
   ffmpeg -i track-01.wav -c:a libvorbis -q:a 6 track-01.ogg
   Use -q:a 4 for smaller files or -q:a 7 to 8 when retaining more quality matters.

For a graphical workflow, install the vgmstream component in foobar2000 to audition supported WEM or BNK streams. Use foobar2000's Convert → … function with an installed Ogg Vorbis encoder after confirming that the component exposes the required stream.

Generic online converters are not a practical option for Wwise BNK files: they usually cannot parse SoundBank structures, resolve external WEM references, or handle Wwise-specific codecs. Avoid uploading game assets to web converters, particularly when the files are proprietary, unreleased, or covered by a game's license terms.

Quality and compatibility limits

If the source WEM audio already uses Vorbis or Opus, decoding it to WAV and re-encoding as Vorbis creates another lossy generation. Retain the original BNK and WEM files for archiving and use the extracted WEM directly when the destination tool supports it.

Some older Wwise Vorbis WEM files can be reconstructed as Ogg Vorbis with ww2ogg, followed when needed by revorb. This can avoid a decode-and-re-encode pass, but it requires the appropriate Wwise codebook file, such as packed_codebooks_aoTuV_603.bin, and does not support all modern Wwise codecs. Use vgmstream plus FFmpeg for PCM, ADPCM, Opus, unsupported Vorbis variants, or failed ww2ogg conversions.

A converted file may be a short voice line, a music segment, silence, or an alternate-language asset rather than a complete in-game cue. Game event logic, random selection, volume changes, and loop behavior are stored in the SoundBank and are generally not preserved in a plain Ogg Vorbis export.