.APE

Introduction

APE files are made by Monkey’s Audio, a lossless audio compressor written by Matthew T. Ashland and first released in 2000. It usually compresses a little better than FLAC, at the cost of slower encoding and decoding, and is popular for CD rips on Windows.

Monkey’s Audio also gave its name to the APE tag format, which other formats such as WavPack and Musepack use for their tags.

Structure

An APE file starts with the four bytes MAC (with a trailing space). A descriptor and a header follow, giving the format version, the compression level, the number of frames and blocks, the channel count, bit depth and sample rate. A seek table lists where each frame starts, and the compressed frames make up the rest of the file. Tags sit at the end, usually as an APEv2 tag beginning APETAGEX. Numbers are little-endian.

Links