Monkey's Audio

From MediaCoderWiki

Monkey’s Audio is a file format for audio data compression. Being a lossless format, Monkey’s Audio does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as AAC, MP3, Vorbis and Musepack.

Data file compression is employed in order to reduce bandwidth, file transfer time, and/or storage requirements. A digital recording (such as a CD) encoded to the Monkey’s Audio format can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. As with the Apple Lossless format, files encoded to Monkey’s Audio are typically reduced to about half of the original size[1], with data transfer rates and bandwidth requirements being reduced accordingly.

Monkey’s Audio's drawbacks are that it is proprietary software, and has limited support on software platforms other than Windows. There are alternatives such as FLAC and WavPack that may offer more options for some users.

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