QUOTE(Fryguy @ Apr 8 2006, 09:28 PM)

I was under the impression that flac was in general superior to monkey?
FLAC has lots of advantages over ape. Decoding is super fast for one thing. It also really nice on the CPU when playing. There are also several pieces of hardware supporting flac. If I recall, MAC also has some odd licensing for the source code, whereas FLAC is fully open sourced, or something like that. Multiplatform support for FLAC is easier and better than for MAC. Basically the only advantage of MAC over FLAC is the compression ratio. Speed of encoding/decoding and overall support and functionality falls short of FLAC. If size is your only concern something like LA or OptimFrog do more than MAC for compression if my brain isn't malfunctioning.

EDIT: by the way, WavPack, IMO falls right in middle. Can encode/decode very fast. Decoding is a bit slower than FLAC, but compression is a bit better. Encodes much faster than MAC, even on High mode, although file size is still a bit larger. CPU useage is quite low on playback as well, comperable to flac.