Monkey's Audio
| Monkey's Audio | |
|---|---|
| A fast and powerful lossless audio compressor | |
| Developer(s) | Matt Ashland |
| Release | 2000; 24 years ago |
| Type | Lossless |
| Recommended encoder | 5.17 (23 January 2020) |
| Website | monkeysaudio.com |
Monkey's Audio (APE) is a freeware lossless audio compression format with a highly competitive compression algorithm, and is used primarily by Windows users. Although software is available for Linux, Monkey's Audio is not as popular among this operating system's users. Monkey's Audio suffers from slow decompression speeds as compared to other lossless audio codecs.
Monkey's Audio uses a combination of traditional lossless compression tactics (linear prediction and channel coupling) and a simple neural network. To store the output values of its prediction step it uses range coding, modified to work well with more or less continuous values.
Its main competitor is FLAC, which has more features than Monkey's Audio (streaming support, for example) and hardware support to its advantage, though its efficiency in compression is not as great.
Monkey's Audio is released under a "custom" license that allows you to do pretty much anything with the source code, on the provision that you ask the author for permission.
See also
Installing
Go to Monkey's audio download page and download the latest installer for your system, double click the installer and run.
- find a suitable audio recording (.WAV), or record an audio session using Audacity and save to PCM (.WAV) , now proceed and run Monkey's Audio, select your (.WAV) audio file and compress, you now have an audio file compressed in (.APE).
Decoding
Recommend decoding with foobar2000.
- foobar2000 - foo_input_monkey component provides decoding support for monkey's audio files (.APE).
Alternative decoding with foobar2000 and FFmpeg.
- foobar2000 - foo_input_ffmpeg component provides FFmpeg support with FFmpeg Decoder Wrapper.
- FFmpeg Decoder Wrapper
- Zeranoe FFmpeg Builds http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/
Setting up FFmpeg Decoder Wrapper in foobar2000.
- Download the foo_input_ffmpeg plugin (Double click on the plugin to Install), Next from foobar2000 Menu select Option >> Configure >> Playback >> Decoding >> FFmpeg Decoder Wrapper > select 'Monkey's Audio' tick box, also within FFmpeg Decoder Wrapper option screen, you can browse location for FFmpeg.
- Assign Path for FFmpeg in Windows 10
Windows 10 users you can also Assign a Path for FFmpeg from the 'System Properties >> Enviroment Variables ( Use Windows 10 Search, to find Enviroment Variables ) Select Path from system variables >> Edit' >>New >> Add >> C:\ffmpeg\Bin , assuming you have FFmpeg extracted at this location.
Players
Additional Supported software for playing (.APE) audio files.
- foobar2000 + Plugin ( Windows )
- Winamp + Monkey's audio installer ( Windows )
- VLC plays (.APE) YES, seek bar is unresponsive when playing. ( Windows / Linux ? )
External links
- Monkey's Audio - Official website
- Monkey's Audio on Wikipedia