Monkey's Audio

Monkey’s Audio is a file format for audio data compression. Being a lossless compression format, Monkey's Audio does not remove information from the audio stream, as lossy compression formats such as MP3, AAC, and Vorbis do.

Like other methods of compression, the main advantage of using Monkey's Audio lies in a reduction of bandwidth and/or a reduction in storage requirements, but, in the case of Monkey's Audio, there is no sacrificing of the integrity of the audio source (as there would be with, for example, MP3). For example, a digital recording (such as a CD) encoded to Monkey's Audio can be decompressed into an identical copy of the audio data. Audio sources encoded to Monkey's Audio are typically reduced to about half of the original size^[1].

Monkey's Audio is suitable for distribution, playback and archival purposes. However, it is a proprietary software, it is often too slow to decode on portable audio devices, and it has limited/problematic support on software platforms other than Windows. There are alternatives that provide the user with more freedom and official support for more platforms, such as the FLAC format.

Monkey's Audio files use the filename extension .ape for audio and .apl for track metadata info.

Comparisons

Against other lossless compression formats such as FLAC, Shorten and WavPack, Monkey's Audio compares well in some areas and worse in others.

While lossless audio compression heavily relies on the file being compressed, Monkey's Audio generally achieves compression rates which are slightly better than FLAC and significantly better than the older Shorten. Given this, both encoding and decoding are generally slightly slower than both FLAC and Shorten, and due to design decisions, the decoder is problematic to implement on portable digital audio players. It suffers from relatively slow seeking, depending on the compression level chosen.^{[citation needed]}

Monkey's Audio was criticized because it was not free software or open source, and for its peculiar and ambiguous license. This means that most Linux distributions and other operating systems that rely on only free software could not include it^[2] and the software ecosystem around Monkey's Audio is less varied than that of other, more freely licensed lossless compressors such as FLAC. Since FLAC comes pre-installed with most Linux distributions, FLAC is typically preferred by users running that operating system. The older Shorten format has been used for many years in the live taping community. Sites such as etree typically still use Shorten, though some are beginning to move to FLAC.

Since Monkey's Audio is a lossless compression method, it is not readily comparable with lossy compression methods such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC. The two different types of formats have different aims. The aim of Monkey's Audio is to preserve an exact reproduction of the original file in as small a space as possible. The aim of lossy codecs is to discard sound data in an intelligent manner so that it fits the amount of space (or bit rate) specified by the user while retaining as much quality as possible.

Since Monkey's Audio preserves the entire quality of the original file, files tend to be significantly larger than lossy compression formats such as MP3. A typical Monkey's Audio file will use around 600 to 700 kilobits per second (kb/s) for CD quality audio. MP3 allows the user to select a bitrate but typical bitrates chosen are 128 to 192 kilobits per second which allow good, but not perfectly identical, quality.

Supported platforms

Officially, Monkey's Audio is only available for the Microsoft Windows platform. There was some discussion on the Monkey's Audio website about official support for Linux and Mac OS users, though none of this came to fruition. A developer by the name of SuperMMX released an unofficial port in early 2005, which also includes plugins to allow playback using the popular audio players XMMS and Beep Media Player. This port was originally developed for Linux but, since version 3.99 update 4 build 4, it has included support for Mac OS X as well as Linux on the PowerPC and SPARC architectures.

However, the legal status of this unofficial port is quite uncertain since the project has not received official approval from Monkey's Audio's author, something which may be required by the legally ambiguous license under which it is released.^[3] Also, while its license explicitly allows including it in GPL products, it does so in a contradictory way,^[2] so many Linux distributions will not include the Monkey's Audio software since its licence is neither free software nor open source.

See also

• TTA
• WavPack
• Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP)
• OptimFROG

References

External links

• Monkey's Audio – official website

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