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I need to convert flac files to ape. Googled for that topic, but seems like ape file is outdated, so no solution was found. Any tools, ideas to resolve the problem?

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    In the title you are asking for 'F -> A' , and in the body of the question 'A -> F'? The former sounds less likely, but you may want to clarify your wording
    – Alex Stragies
    Jul 8, 2019 at 11:22
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    noticed that too late, tried to cover both directions in the answer, hope it helps anyway
    – frostschutz
    Jul 8, 2019 at 11:24
  • I have updated question, thanks @AlexStragies
    – alexche8
    Jul 16, 2019 at 9:18

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I never heard of this file format before, so this is all Google / Wikipedia:

Monkey's Audio on Wikipedia

The multi-platform ffmpeg supports decoding Monkey's Audio files since version 0.5. A GStreamer plug-in is also available, but only for the older 0.8.x version. A number of Mac OS X players and rippers support the format as well. It is also available as a port and package on FreeBSD.

While the license text claims to permit using the official Monkey's Audio codec in GPL projects, several Linux distribution maintainers have found the license to be contradictory. It does not permit redistribution or modification, and thus is not considered open-source or free software.

License issues are always a joy...

And indeed this seems to be the case, at least my version of ffmpeg states:

$ ffmpeg -decoders 2> /dev/null | grep -Ei '(flac|monkey)'
 A....D ape                  Monkey's Audio
 AF...D flac                 FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
$ ffmpeg -encoders 2> /dev/null | grep -Ei '(flac|monkey)'
 A..... flac                 FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)

So ffmpeg has a decoder for APE, but no encoder. So you should be able to convert/decode APE to FLAC, but it won't convert/encode anything to APE. And if it's not in ffmpeg, then there's not much hope...

Monkey's Audio files can be encoded and decoded on any platform which has a J2SE implementation, by the means of the unofficial JMAC library, which is Free software licensed under the GNU LGPL.

So that leaves you with JMAC http://jmac.sourceforge.net (I haven't tried it)

Or downloading the Monkey's Audio for Windows and running that in wine or a Windows VM. It seems the program is still being updated (latest version of June 18, 2019).

But wait, a quick search on GitHub also found this https://github.com/fernandotcl/monkeys-audio - I haven't tried it either.

With any of these you should verify the quality of the results. Good luck!

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  • Thanks, will check and comment about results.
    – alexche8
    Jul 16, 2019 at 9:18

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