APE (Monkey’s Audio)
Also known as: Monkey’s Audio, .ape file, mac audio
APE (Monkey’s Audio) is a lossless audio format that compresses CD-quality sound with no loss in quality, typically smaller than the original WAV. It plays back identical to the source, but native support is rare outside dedicated audio players, so it is often converted to FLAC or MP3 for everyday use.
- Lossless — no quality is discarded
- Smaller than WAV, larger than MP3
- Limited device support; often converted
What APE is
APE files use Monkey’s Audio, a lossless codec — it shrinks audio without discarding any data, so decoding restores the exact original waveform. Files use the .ape extension and are popular for archiving CD rips at full quality.
Because it is lossless, an APE file is larger than a lossy MP3 or AAC of the same track, but smaller than the uncompressed WAV it came from. The trade-off is heavier CPU use to decode and limited device support.
Playing and converting APE
Apple Music, the iOS Files app, and most phones do not play APE natively. Desktop players like VLC and foobar2000 handle it, but for broad compatibility most people convert APE to FLAC (to stay lossless) or MP3/AAC (to save space).
If you are keeping APE only for storage, converting to FLAC usually plays more widely with the same quality, while converting to MP3 makes much smaller files for phones and car stereos.