Monkey's Audio
Fast, lossless audio compression — bit-for-bit exact playback with compact files.
Pro Audio Converter can convert audio files to and from Monkey's Audio (.ape).
Monkey's Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music. Unlike traditional methods such as MP3, Ogg, or WMA that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey's Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music. That means it always sounds perfect — exactly the same as the original. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. You can always decompress your Monkey's Audio files back to the exact original files, so you'll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you'll always be able to perfectly recreate the original music CD.
Encoding Options
Compression Level — A few things to keep in mind when choosing a compression level. Higher compression always comes at the cost of speed — for compression, decompression, and playback. For that reason, simply picking "high" or "extra high" may not always be best. "Normal" is a pretty good trade-off between speed and compression. The jump from "normal" to "high" only saves around 6 MB on a full audio CD. That savings may not be worth the extra time. The jump from "high" to "extra high" is even bigger and only saves another few MB per CD, so that mode is only recommended when compression is absolutely crucial. If you listen to your music while using your computer, keep in mind the CPU usage differences between the options.
Sample Rate — The number of samples of audio carried per second, measured in Hz or kHz (1000 Hz). 44.1 kHz is the sampling rate of audio CDs and 48.0 kHz is common for professional video. Higher sample rates result in higher quality audio with larger file sizes. Setting this to Auto creates an output file with the same sample rate as the input file.
Bit Depth — The number of bits used to represent each sample. Increasing bit depth reduces quantization noise and improves the signal-to-noise ratio by about 6 dB per bit. 24-bit digital audio has a theoretical maximum S/N of 144 dB, compared to 96 dB for 16-bit. Audio CDs use 16 bits; 24-bit is common in professional audio and video.
