Monkey's Audio

Monkey's Audio is a lossless audio compression codec. Since it is lossless, there is no quality loss from the source audio once it is compressed. It achieves a compression rate of about 40%. The files use the .APE file extension. It's main advantage over lossy compression formats such as MP3 is obvious, the quality of MP3 is not near as good. However, the files are much larger than simple MP3 files which is why MP3 files would be more available online than APE files.

A plug-in to burn APE files to CD using Nero is available here: Nero Plugins.

Related Guides

How to play APE files- This article covers how to play APE files (called Monkey's Audio). It covers the easiest methods to playing this audio format (basically download and play) and also covers adding support for Monkey's Audio to a variety of more common players such as Windows Media Player.