What is Monkeys Audio / APE?
Monkey’s Audio is a popular lossless audio codec used to create very high quality versions of audio files. Since it is lossless, if you were to compress an entire audio CD to APE files using Monkey’s Audio, you would be losing no quality whatsoever, and could technically reconstruct the original CD-Audio completely. Compare that to lossy compression formats such as MP3, OGG Vorbis or Musepack (MPC). Once of the biggest differences you notice immediately is the file size difference; APE files are generally much larger. Monkey’s Audio is proprietary software and so it has much less support across media players than alternatives. Warning: Lossless to Lossy Conversion You are about to convert a lossless audio file to a lossy compression. This basically means that some quality will be lost forever. Lossless formats only compress audio but don’t permanently cut out any data. Lossy compressions, like MP3, however, do permanently remove data to save file space. Foobar 2000 APE Plug-in Install
