Monkey’s Audio in 2015. Who remembers this format? (APE)

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Well, I remember The Grape APE cartoon. And Rise of the Planet of the APEs and Dawn of the Planet of the APEs.

I’ve never really used or heard of APE… I knew it existed, but I figured it wasn’t important to know about since most everyone uses FLAC for lossless.

many of my older lossless releases are in .ape. i never used it for a transcode.

Occasionally I download stuff in ape format, that I convert asap to flac.
Ape doesn’t behave nicely with player, when you want to quickly seek a position.
When I play an ape file, there’s always a small delay before the players begin.
Regarding accidental corruption of files, I also think that flac behaves more nicely (more tolerance with flac).

when you want to quickly seek a position

APE used to have higher compression, but that also meant slower response time when seeking like that.
All media players used to do it.

I never found an appeal to the APE format. I think only one portable I had could play APE instead of FLAC.

I don’t think APE can stand up to FLAC with recent developments.
In terms of performance.

APE’s only selling point was the space saved from an entire collection stored in it vs being stored in FLAC. The downside was obviously the slower decode speed, making it troublesome for those that like to seek or play different songs quickly. Against the new FLAC….I’m guessing it barely compresses better and is obviously much slower.

Of course, it probably still has that strong following over in asia that it achieved for whatever reason.

tak = ape compression + flac decode speed + faster than flac encode speed

Once this came out, ape began to be used less.

Then also FLAC came out with 1.3.x came out with similar performance to tak…

i too still have some ape scores in archive, preferring flac though.

I still use both APE and TAK, they do what they’re supposed to, just like FLAC.

Then also FLAC came out with 1.3.x came out with similar performance to tak…

There’s still a lot of test builds on the HydrogenAudio forum from different compilers.
With a lot of different benchmark results.
Especially where some users enabled AVX extension. Tbh, the AVX didn’t make much of a drastic difference compared to SSE2.

I wouldn’t mind seeing updates for TAK and give that a try. I used it a couple times back when FLAC was only 1.2.1.
It hasn’t been updated for quite some time, however.
TAK v2.3.0 Jun 18 2013.

I think the author of TAK considered any further updates would require porting the code to a different language, and doesn’t feel like doing it now.

Then again, the 2.3 tak has best performance as of this moment, in general. But flac 1.3.1 is out http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/flac/ so we’ll see how that works, if it’s faster.

There’s also this, which is faster for obvious reasons FLACCL – CUETools wiki (http://www.cuetools.net/wiki/FLACCL) a comparison (http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=107611&st=25&p=882804&#entry882804)

There’s also this, which is faster for obvious reasons FLACCL – CUETools wiki (http://www.cuetools.net/wiki/FLACCL) a comparison (http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=107611&st=25&p=882804&#entry882804)

True, but useless for anyone without an Nvidia/AMD (via opencl) graphics card that’s good enough for that.
Really mature cards are probably too old and slow to match against ICL or GCC builds of FLAC 1.3.1.

I’ve used FLACCL a couple times and found it quite handy.

It does support unconventional compression levels beyond 8, but I don’t use them because I don’t know what would like them afterward.

I’ve considered switching over to FLACCL for FLAC encoding.

IIRC, the pertinent updates for that, along with CUEtools require some hunting down to do, or the Alpha/Beta release of CUEtools.
I remember it was messy for awhile after someone updated FLACCL.

ape, tak, flac……

I ‘m sorry, but am I the only who feels like that this lossless thing seems more like who sells more? not better… More.

I use APE all the time for archival purposes, but FLAC for listening.

of course I remember .. this was a good time 🙂

Interesting info Sparky, I know of the APE format but never cared for it.
Sometimes I find something in APE, download it, convert tracks to WAV, covert tracks to FLAC.
But one thing I find most annoying is that they are usually cd image rips to one APE file.

Nowadays I’m downloading a lot of my lossless albums from Chinese forums. Chinese people upload albums in APE very frequently along with TAK and TTA. My problem with these formats is that many audio players still do not include decoding/encoding support for them.

Yeah, I remember this. I never cared for it.

Reminds me of another (the OGG files). The Good, The Bad, and the OGGly. LOL

Reminds me of another (the OGG files).

But, OGG is a lossy format…

I don’t know what you mean.

Yeah it is. My bad. I got to thinking of file types I don’t use anymore.

A lot of the trouble I’ve come across with ape (and I’m sure it’s the
uploader), is tracks ripped to one super-long ape file.

That depends on the way the album gets ripped, FLAC can also come in the form of a single "image", as long as you have the .cue, though, you’re free to do what you want with it. I personally prefer "image" rips, find them to be nicer than a list of tracks. Such method of ripping gets rid of a bunch of problems, too:

– Filenames too long for a few tracks.

– There’s no risk to miss a track or two when compressing for sharing or whatever.

Yeah it is. My bad. I got to thinking of file types I don’t use anymore.

A lot of the trouble I’ve come across with ape (and I’m sure it’s the
uploader), is tracks ripped to one super-long ape file.

Oh. I see the distinction now.

And, yeah. Single-images are a pain to separate.
EAC and other rippers have advanced to the point where we really don’t need single-image to burn to CD anymore.
With secure ripping and a good CD burner, there’s no real point to single-images these centuries.