Hello,

I had backed up one of my audio CDs - by creating APEs and storing it on a CDR. Now I want to decode it - but Monkey's Audio says Error: Invalid Input File when decoding.

I do not remember the encoder version used (How do I determine it anyway?). Also the APEs wont play in Winamp, no File Info either. Please help!

Are Monkey's Audio files not backwards-compatible??

The fact that my APEs dont decode more or less proves it. I do not know which MAC version I used to encode. But if MAC was backward compatible, it would have decoded it

Time to switch to FLAC?

Don't know whether or not this will work, but you might try an alternate compile of Monkey's Audio to see whether it has any effect upon the results. The SHNTool site has a modified version of MAC 3.97, which might help. Still, if you successfully decrypt this one, you may want to consider another format. FLAC is good, and possibly the most versatile of the available lossless compression schemes; it's what I would recommend, at this point.

- M.

Thanks. Downloading the FLAC binaries right away. I CANNOT risk losing losless files.

MAC is backwards compatible. Possibly you have a WAV with a APE extension? Not much else I can think of to solve your problem.

The beginning of an APE file will start with the "MAC". If anything else (i.e. "RIFF" = WAV file) won't decompres with Monkey's Audio.

It's possible that the CD-R is corrupted yet your drive thinks it's properly reading and applying error correction to recover the data. If this is the case then MAC isn't the problem and most likely any sort of compression would produce the same results.

Ive verified that as well. If my CDR was corrupted, Windows Explorer would not have allowed me to copy it to my hard drive. Ive successfully copied the file to my hard drive without an CRC errors by Windows.

This is a format problem for sure.

In fact many other Monkey Audio use also had the same problem. See this thread: http://www.monkeysaudio.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/Y...&num=1041485690

This is a strange problem but it is not a format problem of Monkey's.

If file has errors this most likely occurred because of hardware problem on the system it was encoded with. The most common cause of errors is bad RAM but I've seen many problems with some chipsets. A glitchy chipset can cause the following:

-file corruption during hard disk write
-incorrectly written data to a CD being burned
-tons of Windows BSOD and crashes

But even if the file is remotely intact it should still be readable using the WinAmp plug-in with "Ignore bitstream errors" option checked. Except maybe if the header was corrupted, which I was asking about in my previous post (try Quick View to see the beginning of the APE file).

The file was encoded on a Intel PIII 450 Mhz (Slot 1) on a SE 440 BX2 motherboard and 128 MB Apacer technology PC 100 SDRAM.

I will try the Quick View option to check the file header. It coudl be a problem here itself.

Grrrrreeeeeeaaat!!! This modified version worked !! thanx a ton

You're welcome.

- M.