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Monkey's Audio Monkey’s Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music. Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or lqt that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music. That means it always sounds perfect – exactly the same as the original. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. (think of it as a beefed-up Winzip™ for your music) The other great thing is that you can always decompress your Monkey's Audio files back to the exact, original files. That way, you'll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you'll always be able to recreate the original music CD if something ever happens to yours.
Features: - Efficient (fast and great compression): Monkey's Audio is highly optimized and highly efficient - Perfect sound: absolutely no quality loss, meaning it sounds perfect and decompresses perfect (it's lossless!) - Media Center™, Winamp™, and more support: supported by many popular players and rippers - Easy: the Windows environment interface is both powerful and easy to use - Free: Monkey’s Audio is completely free! - Error detection: Monkey’s Audio incorporates redundant CRC’s to ensure proper decompression of data (errors never go unnoticed) - Tagging support: Monkey’s Audio uses its own extremely flexible APE Tags so you can easily manage and catalogue your Monkey’s Audio collection. - External coder support: you can use Monkey's Audio as a front-end for all of your encoding needs |
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Compressor |
Efficiency* |
Time for Album (650 MB) |
Compression: Size of Album (650 MB) / % |
Playing |
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Monkey's Audio 3.86b1 (high) |
208.5 |
2.2 min |
367.1 MB / 56.5% |
Winamp (with seeking); <1% CPU |
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Monkey’s Audio 3.86b1 (normal) |
206.9 |
1.8 min |
373.3 MB / 57.4% |
Winamp (with seeking); <1% CPU |
|
Monkey’s Audio 3.86b1 (fast) |
200.2 |
1.4 min |
385.7 MB / 59.3% |
Winamp (with seeking); <1% CPU |
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Monkey's Audio 3.86b1 (extra high) |
199.3 |
6.7 min |
360.0 MB / 55.4% |
Winamp (with seeking); <3% CPU |
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Perfect Clarity Audio (Siren Jukebox 2.0) |
195.5 |
3.0 min |
379.5 MB / 58.4% |
Siren Jukebox only; 3% - 4% CPU |
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WavPack 3.6 (high) |
194.0 |
2.6 min |
383.8 MB / 59.1% |
Winamp (with seeking); <1% CPU |
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RKAU 1.07 (fast) |
191.1 |
9.2 min |
366.4 MB / 56.4% |
Winamp (with seeking); 8% - 10% CPU |
|
LPAC 3.01 (extra high – not random access) |
190.8 |
9.6 min |
366.1 MB / 56.3% |
Winamp (with seeking); ~1% CPU |
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Shorten |
188.1 |
1.9 min |
397.0 MB / 61.1% |
Winamp (can't seek); <1% CPU |
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FLAC 0.7 (default) |
188.0 |
6.2 min |
378.0 MB / 58.2% |
Winamp (not functional on test machine) |
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WavArc 1.1 (-c1) |
187.0 |
2.3 min |
395.6 MB / 60.9% |
Can’t play |
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LPAC 1.01 (fast) |
185.2 |
2.3 min |
397.9 MB / 61.2% |
Winamp (with seeking); <1% CPU |
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LPAC 3.01 (fast – not random access) |
184.9 |
2.4 min |
397.6 MB / 61.2% |
Winamp (with seeking); <1% CPU |
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WavPack 3.6 (normal) |
184.4 |
2.1 min |
400.3 MB / 61.6% |
Winamp (with seeking); <1% CPU |
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RKAU 1.07 (normal) |
183.5 |
17.4 min |
366.8 MB / 56.4% |
Winamp (with seeking); 9% - 11% CPU |
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WavPack 3.6 (fast) |
179.8 |
2.0 min |
407.6 MB / 62.7% |
Winamp (with seeking); <1% CPU |
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WaveZIP 2.01 |
176.8 |
2.4 min |
408.9 MB / 62.9% |
Can’t play |
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RKAU 1.07 (high) |
172.3 |
43.5 min |
368.2 MB / 56.7% |
Winamp (with seeking); 11% - 13% CPU |
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WavArc 1.1 (-c5) |
167.7 |
61.7 min |
369.8 MB / 56.9% |
Can’t play |
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RAR (Winrar 2.70, max with “–mm”) |
150.3 |
11.4 min |
424.0 MB / 65.2% |
Can’t play |
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ZIP (Winrar 2.70, max) |
34.1 |
5.9 min |
600.7 MB / 92.4% |
Can’t play |
Compressing one WAV file with Monkey Audio
1. What's a WAV file ?
It's a file that contains AUDIO data in some form. The audio that almost all your WAV files will consist of is normal 16 bit PCM. This is short for "Pulse Code Modulation of a resolution of 16 bits". The audio Compact Disc stores audio in two 16 bit PCM streams that are interleaved, just like a WAV file usualy is. Interleaved audio means, that we first have a bit of the left channel, then a bit of the right channel, then a bit of the left one and so on.
CD audio also comes at 44100 pieces per second of this 16bit PCM data. These pieces are called samples. For every second of audio on a CD you will therefore need 88200 samples per second for two channels, because a CD carries stereo audio. Every sample needs 16 bits of storage space, therefore we need 88200 * 16 bits = 1411200 bits per second for 16 bit PCM stereo audio.
And since 8 bits = 1 byte, it amounts to 176400 bytes per second and 10584000 bytes per minute. Since 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte and 1024 kilobyte = 1 megabyte, this amounts to a little under 10.1 megabytes(MB) of data per minute of audio. A standard audio CD carries up to 74 minutes of audio. A 650 MB CDROM only a little over 64 minutes. This is mainly because a CDROM needs more error correction codes, which are safe guards against read erros. Audio is not as critical, and thus doesn't get as much of these safe guards. An audio CD can therefore carry 746.933 MB of pure stereo 16bit PCM audio.
Since most of you will be dealing with CD audio and because a page consisting of 'Open file, press compress' seemed boring, this little introduction to digital audio storage seemed apropriate.
2. Select the mode and pick a file
The interface has a row of buttons in the top part of the interface.
Click on Compress. As our filelist area is still empty, the interface pops up a dropdown list of things beneath this button.
As you can see, there's lots of stuff we can do here. Select Compress. Don't worry about the other options. We will explain them later.The mode you've chosen will be displayed with an icon and text on that button, so you'll always know what Monkey Audio is up to.
We have just set the working mode of Monkey Audio. Actualy this is quite important, because it determines what files you are allowed to have Monkey Audio work with. Had we chosen Decompress, Monkey Audio would expect compressed files and would prevent us from selecting normal WAV files with the Add Files function, which is what we're going to do now.
Click on Add Files to bring up a normal file dialog. Select a file you wish to compress. Monkey Audio will show you only files that it can process in the working mode you selected above. For Compress these are WAV files.
The file you have by now hopefully selected appears in the big filelist area, where original path and filename are displayed, as well as its size in MB(megabytes). The other information areas are empty right now.
3. Where does my file go ?
You can tell Monkey Audio where to put the compressed file in the Options. Click on Options to check 'em out.
We'd like to check out the Output options. So without pause, turn your attention to the left side of the window whack the third icon from the top.
The round buttons indicate that you can only choose one option and none of the others. The checkbox indicates a yes/no choice for that option.
You should now select "Output to the same directory as source files" for the Output Location option and "Leave Source File(s) intact" for the After Successuful Operation option. You'll be able to compare the original WAV to the compressed file easily. The options are pretty straight forward.
4. What're you gonna do to my file ?
Nothing actualy. The original file won't get touched, if you've made the right choices in the Options. A new file will be written. What type of file will this be ? Good question. Check out button next the Mode button, or second from the left if that suits you. Here Monkey Audio displays what compression mode it'll use on your file to produce the new file.
Monkey Audio has lots and lots of different compression modes. For now, click on High.
Select the High mode, if it isn't already selected. The external compressors are accessible here too, but you can safley ignore them for now and pick Monkey Audio's top world class algorhythems. Just so you know, Monkey Audio supports three more lossless and four lossy compressors via the external menu.
5. Fire away
You have told Monkey Audio to Compress, chosen a file to be compressed, asked Monkey Audio to place the result in the directory where your original WAV file is and set the compression mode. Monkey Audio will remember all these settings, even the filelist if you want it to(see Genral Options). You won't have to go through all those options again if you don't want them changed next time.
Now click on the Mode button, which should be showing a smiling monkey head and have "Compress" written underneath it. Whenever you've got something in that filelist, clicking on the Mode button will start the processing. Should you want to change the Mode, click on that little black downward arrow to the right of the button to bring up the dropdown list of working modes for Monkey Audio.
Nice as Monkey Audio is, it will remind you that you might loose your filelist if you change working modes now. This happens for example when you change from Compress to Decompress. You can't decompress a normal WAV file after all.
You've hit the button. Watched the numbers change with amazing speed. That's it. You've compressed your first WAV file with Monkey Audio. The new file has the same name and has the extension .APE . You can play this file with Winamp, if you chose to install the plugin and in fact have Winamp installed.
You can also drag-and-drop one or as many files as you like in to the filelist area of Monkey Audio. They will be added to the file list. You can even add complete directories by dragging a folder in to Monkey Audio. It'll search through all subdirectories for files it can compress and add them to the list. And don't worry if you drop something different than WAV files in to Monkey Audio in the Compress working mode. Monkey Audio will pick up all the WAV files and forget about the rest.
Decompressing files with Monkey Audio
I know it's obvious, but you need a file to decompress. Monkey Audio by default installs a couple of external compressors along with its own stuff. It does not bring along the four lossy compressors, which also decompress their compressed files. These are Lame, MP3Enc, MP+ and OGG. Therefore, if you wish to decompress a file that one of those culprits spat out, you'll have to gather up those compressors and place them in the installdir\external directory. If you haven't changed the default installation direcotry upon installing Monkey Audio, the installdir is c:\program files\Monkey's Audio.
First select Decompress in the Mode menu. You can also select Decompress via the standard pulldown menu Mode/Decompress
Click on Add Files to pick the file or files you'd like to decompress (calling it unpack seems unfitting, because we're not dealing with archives that carry multiple files).
Check the Options to see where your decompressed stuff is going and to make shure the original compressed file is not deleted after Monkey Audio is finished with it.
Now simply hit the Mode button and Monkey Audio will get to work.
In this case the Mode button should be showing Decompress.
Remember, if you'd like to change the working mode, click on the little black downward arrow next to the mode button or use the standard menu Mode/ at the top of the window.
What this amounts to is that the interface never changes. All that changes is a working mode and perhaps your compression mode. Apart from that all you'll be doing is dropping files in to the Monkey Audio window and hitting the Mode button.
Converting files with Monkey Audio
Suppose you have a few .APE files(a file with the .APE file extension is a file compressed with one of the Monkey Audio compression routines Fast, Normal, High or Very High). You might want an MP3 version of the files. Normally you'd decompress all the files and then compress them with your favorite mp3 encoder.
If you're using LAME or MP3ENC, you're in luck because Monkey Audio can convert those .APE files to MP3 form by decompressing one file at a time and then encoding that decompressed file in to an MP3 file with a chosen MP3 encoder. Actualy you can pick any compression mode to be used for the output.
The Convert mode is the same as the Decompression mode, except that it doesn't except WAV files as input, but all the compresed formats you can produce with Monkey Audio.
Please note: Drag and Drop'ing of APE files works, but everything else needs to be added to the filelist via the Add Files button or menu item.
First you need to select the Convert working mode.
Hit the "Convert" icon.
Now you do all the usual. You pick the files you'd like to convert. Remember to add any non-APE files via the Add Files button or menu item. Then check your output options and if everything is to your satisfaction, hit the Mode button and watch Monkey Audio work.
If you're converting a file that was compressed with one of the external compressors, you'll need that same compressor to decompress it. So make sure you have the compressor in your installdir/external directory.
Most people just use this to convert from one Monkey Audio compression mode to another. It's useful for MP3 encoding too, but the options for Lame are not well presented, not at all actually, since you have to enter the command line options yourself.
I really suggest you read the LAME documentation for this. Or check out Razorlame, a very good frontend for LAME that will display the command line options it uses for LAME. Just copy/paste those options in to the configuration box for LAME in Monkey Audio and you're set.
Here are some example command line options for LAME :
Very high Quality Stereo -b 128 -m s -h -c -V 1 -B 320
High Quality Stereo -b 96 -m s -h -c -V 4 -B 256
Good Quality Joint Stereo -b 96 -m j -h -c -V 5 -B 192
Low Quality Mono Voice -b 24 -m m -h -c -V 7 -B 32 --resample 22.05 --lowpass 11
Monkey's Audio
| Compression Types | Lossless only |
| Supported Modes | Fast, Normal, High & Extra High
Note: There are a couple of things to keep in mind when choosing a compression level. First off, higher compression always comes at the cost of speed - this means during compression, decompression, and playback. For this reason, it may not always be the best to simply pick "high" or "extra high." "Normal" is a pretty good trade-off between speed and compression. The jump from "normal" to "high" only saves around 6mb on a full audio CD. This savings may not be worth the extra time involved. The jump from "high" to "extra high" is even bigger, and only saves another few mb's a CD. This mode is only recommended when compression is totally crucial. Also, if you listen to your music while you use your computer, you may want to keep in mind the CPU usage differences between the options. |
| Positive | fast very good compression preserves ALL external data in a WAV file Tagging supports ALL sample frequencies supports 8,16 & 24 bit WAV files free |
| Negative | - |
Lame
(external)
| Compression Types | Lossy | ||||||||
| Supported Modes | any as defined by commandline switches If you'd like clearer controls, you may want to try another frontend. Here are some example settings:
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| Positive | completly free (GPL) it's MP3 very good compression ratio(due to lossy encoding) highly configurable exellent VBR MP3 encoding |
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| Negative | lossy encoding, which makes it bad for preserving CD content slow - around 2xspeed encoding on a 600MHz Athlon |
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| Included in Monkey Audio distribution ? | no | ||||||||
| Homepage | Lame Project Homepage - http://lame.sourceforge.net Razorlame (an exellent Windows frontend for Lame) - www.dors.de/razorlame/ |
MP3Enc
(external)
| Compression Types | Lossy |
| Supported Modes | any as defined by commandline switches For 128kbps encoding the Frauenhofer codec may be superior, but for VBR encoding it is recommended to go with the Lame encoder. |
| Positive | it's MP3 very good compression ratio(due to lossy encoding) |
| Negative | commercial and quite expensive lossy encoding, which makes it bad for preserving CD content slow - around 2xspeed encoding on a 600MHz Athlon not so good VBR MP3 encoding if supported at all,Lame is better there |
| Included in Monkey Audio distribution ? | no |
| Homepage | - |
MP+
(external)
| Compression Types | Lossy |
| Supported Modes | "standard" by default and any as defined by commandline switches You can manipulate settings considerably with the expert settings or go simple with the five profiles. These are: -thumb , -radio , -standard , -xtreme & -insane Simply enter one of those in to the commandline dialogue box of the Configure setting of MP+ Compression Mode. |
| Positive | free (for now) very good compression ratio(due to lossy encoding) highly(!) configurable very good VBR encoding |
| Negative | lossy encoding, which makes it bad for preserving CD content slow - around 2xspeed encoding on a 600MHz Athlon |
| Included in Monkey Audio distribution ? | no |
| - | - |
Ogg
(external)
| Compression Types | Lossy |
| Supported Modes | 128kbps or any as defined by commandline switches There are six modes available right now. 112,128,160,192,256, and 350 kbps for 44.1kHz stereo files(for mono files halve those figures). Choose any bitrate by e.g. adding "-b 112" to the commandline in the configure dialogue of OGG in Monkey Audio. |
| Positive | completly free (GPL) patent free very good compression ratio(due to lossy encoding) easy to use good quality vBR encoder and getting better all the time (I refer to the 1.0 beta4 here) |
| Negative | lossy encoding, which makes it bad for preserving CD content slow - around 2-3xspeed encoding on a 600MHz Athlon |
| Included in Monkey Audio distribution ? | no |
| Homepage | www.xiph.org |
Rkau
(external)
| Compression Types | Lossless and Lossy |
| Supported Modes | fast, normal and high none of the lossy modes are supported |
| Positive | very good compression tagable free |
| Negative | slow loses ALL external data in a WAV file |
| Included in Monkey Audio distribution ? | yes |
| Homepage | - |
Wavpack
(external)
| Compression Types | Lossless & Lossy |
| Supported Modes | Fast - uses non-adaptive, non-searching algorithm Normal High - best lossless Lossy modes are NOT supported in Monkey Audio by default. You can provide additional commandline switches via the Configure option in the compression mode selection of Wavpack, and thereby select lossy compression modes. "-bn" will enable lossy compresion, 'n' is bits/sample (n = 4-15) |
| Positive | fast good compression preserves ALL external data in a WAV file free |
| Negative | Not the best compression no tagging |
| Included in Monkey Audio distribution ? | yes |
| Homepage | Wavpack Homepage - http://www.wavpack.com |
Shorten
(external)
| Compression Types | Lossless and Lossy |
| Supported Modes | default lossless mode no lossy modes are supported |
| Positive | fast average to good compression preserves ALL external data in a WAV file portable(available on most systems) |
| Negative | far from the best compression ratio encoding(compressing) not free for commercial use complicated commandline settings for tweaking compression results |
| Included in Monkey Audio distribution ? | yes |
| Homepage | Etree - etree.org/software/ |
Does Monkey's Audio compress mp3's?
No. MP3's are already a compressed format, and therefore it's not possible to compress them any further.
What compression level should I use?
There are a couple of things to keep in mind when choosing a compression level. First off, higher compression always comes at the cost of speed - this means during compression, decompression, and playback. For this reason, it may not always be the best to simply pick "high" or "extra high." "Normal" is a pretty good trade-off between speed and compression. The jump from "normal" to "high" only saves around 6mb on a full audio CD. This savings may not be worth the extra time involved. The jump from "high" to "extra high" is even bigger, and only saves another few mb's a CD. This mode is only recommended when compression is totally crucial. Also, if you listen to your music while you use your computer, you may want to keep in mind the CPU usage differences between the options.
How can I make "Exact Audio Copy" (EAC) work with MAC?
A1: Start EAC and go into the compression options section (F11). Then, navigate to the "External Compression" tab. Make sure "Use external program for compression" is checked, and then pick "Xing X3Enc MP3 Encoder" from the "Parameter passing scheme" drop-down list. Then click the browse button and find the "MAC.exe" in the Monkey's Audio directory. Then, you need to put "-cXXXX" in the "Additional command line options", where XXXX is the compression level you wish to use. (fast = 1000, normal = 2000, high = 3000, extra high = 4000). Then set whether you want to add ID3 tags and whether you want to erase the original WAV's. You can ignore the bitrate, because MAC uses as many bits as it needs to remain lossless. Then rip away and EAC will compress the files as it goes. Finally, you'll need to rename the files that EAC outputs because it will name them .mp3 files. You can do this about 1000 different ways. Included with MAC is a utility name "Quick Renamer" that should make it pretty easy work.
A2: The newest EAC has built in support for MAC, so you just need to pick "Monkey's Audio Lossless Encoder" as the parameter passing scheme for the external selection, then locate MAC.exe, pick the compression mode, and the other options, and off you go.
How can I add files to MAC?
There are a few ways to add files to MAC. The easiest way may be to simply use the "add file(s)" and "add folder" buttons in the program. Monkey's Audio is also fully drag-and-drop compliant, so you can always just drag the files or folders you want to process right into Monkey's Audio. While dragging-and -dropping, it may be easier if you choose "Always on Top" from the "View" menu so that MAC doesn't disappear when you're looking in Explorer. Finally, you can install explorer extensions (from the options menu) and then right click on files and pick "Add to Monkey's Audio" from inside explorer.
What's up with the cryptic error codes when MAC pieces out? (like Error: 1300)
Well, MAC's error system isn't too great yet. I've spent more time trying to eliminate errors than trying to gracefully deal with them. For now, just remember error = bad. Really, this should get you through for the time being, but MAC's error reporting will get better as time goes on.
Is there anything special I should keep in mind when archiving music with Monkey's Audio?
It's always a good idea to archive the current version of Monkey's Audio alongside your music. This way, if Monkey's Audio changes or goes in the tank, you never lose your music. Just to reassure ya' though, Monkey's Audio ALWAYS maintains backwards compatibility. (from like version 1.80 and on...before that we just won't talk about...ok...in like the first 2 weeks MAC was public I had to make a couple of changes that broke compatibility, but it'll never happen again)
How can I associate Monkey's Audio files with Winamp, so that when I double-click on a .ape file, Winamp starts up and plays it?
First off, make sure you have the Winamp plugin installed. (you can do this through the options menu in Monkey's Audio) Then, just start Winamp, go into the preferences, find the "File Types" section, and highlight "APE". Next time Winamp starts, it should associate itself with APE files. (note: starting with version 2.90, this should be done automatically upon installation)
Monkey's Audio won't start (I keep getting errors), what should I do?
Your settings file may have gotten corrupted. Try erasing the file "settings.dat" in your Monkey's Audio folder, and restarting the program. If this doesn't fix it, email the author and complain.
Why would I use MAC when mp3's are like 1/5 the size?
This just depends. I've said it a lot, but here it goes again: if you're a huge audiophile, in a hurry, or just anal, MAC is a great tool for you. Otherwise, if you don't mind a little quality loss, use mp3.
Why compress at all if the files are only like 1/2 of their original size?
Assuming hard drive space is unlimited (and it never is), MAC offers a few nice advantages over uncompressed .WAV files:
Error detection
there is no way to know if a WAV file is messed up, which is
sort of a major downer
Tagging
MAC lets you tag the APE files so that you can easily manage and catalogue
them (or just keep the info about them in a convenient place)
Normalizing
MAC can optionally normalize during playback so that all your music
reaches the same peak level. (this is nice if you're like me and listen to
Bach next to Metallica next to Janis Joplin)
What is this normalize feature?
It's really pretty simple: for whatever reason, every song has a different peak volume. Like the previous example, Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits only ever gets to like 1/2 of the max volume allowed by a CD. So, even though a 16-bit WAV can hold values from like -32000 to 32000, the highest number in a Janis song is like 15000. What MAC does is store that number (15000) and then scale the song during playback so that it uses the full +-32000. This has a nominal effect on CPU usage, no effect on compression, and no effect on MAC maintaining an exact copy of the original. It just makes it so all your music will play with the same peak level if you want it to, so you don't have to fiddle with the volume knob all the time. Also, this feature in no way impairs the dynamic range of the music.
Exactly what kind of files does MAC support?
For now, the list goes like this: (but it'll hopefully grow as time goes on)
Format: PCM WAVE (standard windows .wav file)
Sample Rate: anything
Bit depth: 8 or 16 or 24
Channels: 1 or 2
As a note, MAC has been tuned primarily for 44khz, 16-bit stereo music, since this is what today's CDs are.
Could you explain the error detection features in MAC?
The first thing MAC does when it compresses a frame (a small chunk of a file) is figure a 32-bit CRC for it. Then, it encodes that value at the front of the frame. When it decompresses a frame, it figures a CRC on the decompressed data and compares it to the original CRC.
This way, it compares the original data with the decompressed data. This is to say,
if something is wrong in prediction (or anti-prediction) the original will not
match the decompressed one.
Right now, CRC's are only used on the audio frames. In a future release, MAC will also
CRC the WAV header and footer bytes also. (normally around 44 bytes a file)
Regardless, if a frame passes the CRC test, there is only about a one in billions chance of
it being corrupt. If a file passes a verify, it means that all of the audio data
is fully intact (every frame passed).
The only problem could ever be if there were disk I/O errors during encoding, so
that what MAC thought it was supposed to encode wasn't what was really on the
HD. HD's have error detection and correction, so the chances of this are about
null. Also, once you enter disk I/O errors into the realm of possibilities, you
can never really be safe.
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