What is APE

APE format, also called Monkey's Audio, is one of the most popular lossless audio format mostly for Microsoft Windows's users. It is created in 2000 by Matthew T. Ashland featuring a highly competitive compression algorithm with the .ape file extension. Unlike traditional ways such as lossy MP3, OGG, WMA or AAC that permanently discard audio data to save space, Monkey's Audio will make exact and bit-for-bit copies of the music during the encoding process and reproduce the original sound source for playback.

Monkey's Audio is an efficient and easy way to compress digital music. With high compression ratio, the encoded audio files are generally reduced to approximately 50% of their original file size, which makes for easy storage. Another thing is that you can decompress your Monkey's Audio files back to the identical original files.

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Main Advantages

Preservation of perfect sound source with good lossless compression — absolutely no quality loss, meaning it sounds and decompresses flawless.

Software media players support — a wide rage of free plugins is available for users to playback on most popular media players, such as Windows Media Player, Foobar2000, Winamp, Media Player Classic, and more.

Main Disadvantages

Limited applicability — lack of supports from cross-platform and mobile multimedia players which makes it more limited to use. Monkey's Audio is currently available on Windows only.

Lower fault tolerance — the music files will be null and void when an error occurred during the transition process even though APE has the feature of detecting error.

Comparison with FLAC Format

Both APE and FLAC are lossless compressed audio format and have good sound quality although they have different algorithm. However, FLAC is larger and has more compatible players than APE as FLAC is completely open while APE is released under a "custom" license that it can only available on Windows platform.