Heya. I've archived about 20 of my disks in Monkeys' Audio Extra High, and it sounds great and plays great on my comp. But sometimes I want to convert to .mp3 for sharing, or portable use, or even try some of the other new codecs. I haven't found a simple way yet. The options I've found:

1. Convert back to wav, then use any compression I like: AFAIK this always destroys the APE tags, which makes it a pretty bad solution.

2. mppenc claims to be able to encode straight from .ape's, but it didn't work on any of them I tried. I guess it has to do with me not using the 3.96b6 to encode the .ape's, but I hadn't heard about it then, and that version isn't even available on the Monkey's Audio site! Unless there is a simple way, I won't re-encode all my music with the b6 MA encoder.

3. dBpoweramp seems ok for some formats (and preserves the tag), but it doesn't do aac, mpc, and I can't use any --alt presets other than r3mix unless I buy some shareware addon that uses the command line.

At minimum I'd like to be able to convert .ape to lame --alt extreme with no hassle of redoing tags or the like. the aac and mpc stuff can wait i suppose. So any ideas? Thanks

edit: FYI i used the official 3.96 release to encode MA.

The most simple way for you would be just to use Monkey's Audio itself.

I have only tried to convert to mp3 (with LAME):
Just put a copy of Lame.exe into the 'external' folder in your 'Monkey's Audio' folder ...
run Monkey's Audio... drag and drop your ape files in the upper field....
choose the 'convert' operation... under 'compression level' you will find a subfolder 'external'...
choose 'Lame' and then configure... type in your desired commandline... press OK...
and then JUST press the 'Convert' button.

I was pretty amazed that it really copies the information out of the APE-Tag into the ID3-Ttag with out doing anything else than just waiting for the file being convertet.

I remember that there has been a bug with converting to mpc (or was it ogg???), i think! Maybe i'm wrong, maybe it's already solved. It will work the same way with the other formats, but i don't know what will happen with to the tags!

Good luck, hope it will work for you!

I never thought of such a simple solution! Thanks so much, I'll give it a try.

edit: just tried it and it works great for mp3s! thanks! mpc is bugged though I think, I get an uncomfirmed error ??? Also it has no aac option, but I'm going to try and rename aacenc to lame.exe and see if that'll fool it.

It has nothing to do with which version of MA you use to encode. The important thing is that mppenc can call MAC 3.96 to decode the ape file, i.e. they have to be in the same directory or in the path variable. The stable versions of mppenc does not yet include tagging in the encoder, so until that is fixed you may use mpcenct to transfer the tags.

dBpowerAMP - and it will preserve ID Tags

the following pipe setup with 3.96b6 should work as well:



..works for me. flac 1.0.3 and shorten will work in a similar way as well


sooo many solutions for just one problem

The latest version of WavPack (3.95) can pipe to stdout also:

www.wavpack.com

yeah dude, pls post your results on AAC, cuz it's my lossy codec right now and ape-> aac sounds useful for portability

At the moment, you cannot pass input to aacenc thru stdin, but I have asked Ivan to take a look at it. He seemed to think it was a good idea so we shall have to wait and see.

Well, after some research, and help from you guys, here's the simplest transcoding methods I've found:
ape > mp3 = use monkey's audio frontend to convert
ape> mpc = drag a group of .ape's onto musedrop /w mppenc 1.06
ape > aac = don't know convert to wav first I suppose
ape > ogg = haven't tried it, but monkey's audio frontend should work ok

all these methods preserve tags, which imo is pretty important.

As I said dBpowerAMP Music Converter will go straight from Ape >> AAC

thnx spoon, ill try it and post my opinion...

as far as I could tell, dbpoweramp does ape >> aac, only through the cli addon, which is shareware. No offense spoon, but when its possible to convert ape > mpc, ape > mp3, ape > ogg, etc. for free, its hard to justify purchasing your software.

I hope to license the Pystel AAC mpeg 2 and 4 codecs, but again it will be a charged for item, primarilly set by the amount pystel want...