How do I listen to an APE file?

January 29, 2006 10:28 PM

How do I listen to an APE file?

I have a series of audiobook files in APE format.
I've searched the interenet and it seems like there are many ways.
I would prefer to convert it to a format that I can play on my iPOD.
Does anyone have an opinion? preference?
Thanks

posted by erd0c to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

APEs are lossless. Convert it back to a wav, convert the wav to a format the iPOd palys (aac or mp3).
posted by orthogonality at 10:40 PM on January 29, 2006

Response by poster: But how?
posted by erd0c at 10:51 PM on January 29, 2006

It's a Monkey's Audio file. See the link for the Wikipedia page and leads for tons of converters/players.
posted by mrbill at 10:56 PM on January 29, 2006

Also FYI, on the Mac I've used xACT a lot with good results.
posted by mrbill at 10:56 PM on January 29, 2006

Official site.
posted by orthogonality at 11:56 PM on January 29, 2006

Monkey's Audio comes with plugins for both Winamp and Foobar. If you have one of those players, install the correct plugin, and you'll be able to just listen to the file directly without converting it.
posted by Malor at 12:14 AM on January 30, 2006

EAC works well for decompressing lossless files (APE, Flac, etc.) and is great for recompressing them into .mp3.

In EAC select "Tools" "Decompress", select APE file and click OK. Then you have a .wav file (these are really big, by the way)


Here's a simple guide to use EAC to compress .wav to .mp3.
posted by sic at 2:37 AM on January 30, 2006

In Windows: install the free dBpowerAMP music converter and the Monkey's Audio codec. Then right-click on the file(s), select Convert from the context menu, and select the format desired (in your case, probably MP3, and you shouldn't need a high bitrate for audiobooks).
posted by mookieproof at 6:35 AM on January 30, 2006

dBpower is an excellent tool to have for all sorts of audio conversion needs.
posted by By The Grace of God at 7:03 AM on January 30, 2006

(monkey's audio is broken for quite some time now and some files have to be kept in ape format forever)
if decompressing the files is not possible with the official program but it plays correctly, use foobar's diskwriter to get the wav
posted by suni at 4:59 PM on January 30, 2006

I'd second mookieproof's suggestion for dBPowerAMP music converter. I've use it for this conversion many times.
posted by btocher at 10:16 AM on January 31, 2006