What is the XSB file format?
In video games, sounds are created separately to match each scenario. Microsoft XACT (Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool), part of the DirectX SDK and later XNA Game Studio, is one such tool for authoring game audio on Xbox and Windows.
.xsb files are the XACT Sound Banks this tool produces. They do not contain audio data. Instead, they hold metadata and playback definitions: cue names, volume and pitch settings, looping rules, and category assignments. The raw waveforms live in a companion .XWB Wave Bank; a matching .xgs file stores XACT Global Settings for the project.
These files are used in video games and stored in the game's sound directory for easy access at runtime. .xsb is a binary format opening with ASCII bytes XSB at offset 0 (hex 58 53 42 00). Tools such as unxwb can extract bank contents on Windows.
Security & safety
RISK: LOWAn .xsb is inert game data - audio metadata with no scripting or executable content, so opening or extracting one is not dangerous. The only practical caution: extracting a game's audio is governed by that game's copyright/EULA, and third-party extraction tools should be downloaded from reputable sources (e.g. the original author's page) rather than random "xsb player" sites, which are often ad/PUP traps since no such standalone player meaningfully exists.
Format details
in a nutshellPrograms that open XSB files
Windows3 apps
unxwb / xactbnk (extraction tools)
Free Community tools (Luigi Auriemma et al.) that dump audio from the .xwb wave bank; the .xsb supplies cue names. The realistic way to get usable audio.
MonoGame
Open-source For developers: load and play XACT .xsb/.xwb banks in code (SoundBank/WaveBank classes) when maintaining an old XNA game.
Microsoft XACT (XNA Game Studio / DirectX SDK)
Free The original authoring tool - opens .xap projects and rebuilds .xsb/.xwb. Legacy: unsupported since the Windows 8 SDK; install only for historical/dev work. Technical details
deep spec| File type | Binary audio-metadata bank (sound cue definitions; does NOT store raw audio waveforms) |
| Developer | Microsoft - authored within the DirectX SDK and XNA Game Studio toolchain |
| Magic bytes | 58 53 42 00 - ASCII "XSB" followed by a null byte at file offset 0 |
| MIME type | application/octet-stream |
| Companion wave bank | .xwb holds the actual PCM or XMA audio waveforms; .xsb references them by index |
| Global settings file | .xgs (XACT Global Settings) ties all sound banks and wave banks into a single project |
| Editor source file | .xap (XACT Audio Project) is the XML-based source; compiles to .xsb and .xwb at build time |
| Stored playback data | Cue names, volume and pitch curves, looping flags, instance limits, 3D audio flags, category assignments |
| Audio codecs referenced | Uncompressed PCM (WAV) and XMA (Xbox 360 hardware-accelerated compressed audio) |
| Runtime API | XACT engine (XAudio2 backend on Windows; hardware audio subsystem on Xbox 360) |
| Byte order | Little-endian for Windows/PC builds; Xbox 360 targets compiled to big-endian byte order |
| Header versioning | Layout is undocumented and varies between XACT SDK releases; no public specification exists |
| SDK status | Microsoft discontinued the XACT and XNA SDKs; MonoGame implements a compatible XACT audio runtime |
| Typical game path | Deployed alongside matching .xwb files in the game's Sound or Audio content directory |
| Released | 2004 (XACT in DirectX 9.0c / Xbox; later in XNA Game Studio) |
| Specification | en.wikipedia.org |
XSB conversions
Community Q&A
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