Unreal supports the importing of sounds only in the .wav format. The .wav format is a widely used format that can store raw uncompressed sound data.

The sampling rate is recommended at 44100 Hz or 22050 Hz. As mentioned earlier, the sampling rate determines how often the analog wave is recorded. The higher the frequency (measured in Hertz or Hz), the more data points of the analog wave that are collected, which aids in a better reconstruction of the wave.

The bit depth is set as 16. It determines the granularity at which the amplitude of the audio wave can be recorded, which is also known as the resolution of the sound. For a bit depth of 16, you can get up to 65,536 integer values (216). The reason why we are concerned with the bit depth is because during the sampling process of the analog waves, the actual value of the amplitude of the wave is approximated to one of the integer values that can be stored based on the bit depth. The following figure shows two different bit depths. The figure on the left-hand side illustrates when the bit depth is low, and the signal is more inaccurately sampled because it is sampled in larger increments. The figure on the right-hand side illustrates when the bit depth is higher, and it can be sampled at smaller increments, resulting in a more accurate representation of the wave:

The loss in accuracy of the representation of the wave can be termed as a quantization error. When the bit depth is too low, the quantization error is high.

The Signal to Quantization Noise Ratio (SQNR) is the measurement used to determine the quality of this conversion. It is calculated using the ratio between the maximum nominal signal strength and the quantization error. The better the ratio, the better the conversion.

Unreal currently supports channels such as mono, stereo, 2.1, 4.1, 5.1 6.1, and 7.1.

When importing files into Unreal, take note of the file naming convention that is in place so that the right sound is played from the right channel.

The following table shows the 7.1 surround sound configuration with all the file naming conventions that are necessary for the correct playback:

This table shows you the files that are used for the 5.1 surround system:

This table shows you the files that are used for the 4.0 system: