Monkey's Audio

Monkey’s Audio is a lossless audio compression codec. Unlike lossy methods such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis, or Advanced Audio Coding that permanently discard data to save space, Monkey’s Audio compresses audio in a mathematically perfect way, creating bit-for-bit copies. Therefore, a file compressed with Monkey's Audio always sounds the same as the source file, no matter how many times the resulting file is burnt to a CD, ripped and re-encoded. Monkey's Audio files use the .APE extension.

Monkey's Audio suffers from the downside of lossless codecs, in that its compression ratios is virtually always far lower than "lossy" options, and thus the resulting files take up a premium of hard drive space. An MP3 at 128kb/s often compresses to be about ten times smaller than the original source WAV, while a file compressed with Monkey's Audio will rarely compress to even a 2:1 ratio.

External links

• Monkey's Audio official website
• cue2wav helps Linux users to turn ape+cue into recordable wav files.