They say APE doesn't have it. What is it exactly?

And, what other codec has a better compression rate than FLAC level 8?

Edit: And what are RIFF chunks?

TAK !

It seems to be still in BETA? A lot of features are not available yet.

1) If I'm not mistaken, error robustness means a file can be played back even if it's corrupted (to a certain degree). I.e. if a small chunk of data is corrupted, the player will be able to keep playing the file (starting with the following block of data). Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

2) I assume you mean higher compression. TAK, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, OptimFROG compress better (more). There are others though.

3) Basically metadata for WAV files. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Inte...nge_File_Format

But isn't it even better to not have robustness as you will know if a file is damaged, and will re rip or re encode it, where as if FLAC doesn't even tell you if the file is damaged, and you might not know about the error, so it's like killing your nerves?

sometimes you want to know, and sometimes you don't want to know (like when you're listening). most FLAC tools tell you about damage but in some players there is an option to play through errors.

So does APE have the same level of security as FLAC? Like the same level of error detection/correction when compressing and decompressing?

If "robustness" is just playing through errors then that's not what I'm interested in. I thought "error robustness" is something like error correction, MD5/CRC etc...

I'm just saying that for 2 channel audio on Foobar, why use FLAC when APE can compress more?

Monkey's Audio does have that. The command line codec has two levels of checking: quick (it matches the embedded MD5 sum to the compressed data) and thorough (it decodes the entire file without producing a .wav file).


No reason, really. Most people use FLAC for other reasons (hardware and software compatibility, decoding speed, or simply because they like the format).

For encoding Wav to APE, it is just as secure and error free as FLAC right?

On another thought, is there anything wrong with WMA lossless? Because on the hydrogen wiki WMA also has a high compression rate like APE and supports multi channel.

I think that FLAC is more secure than APE. I gonna tell you my personal experience: I had a DVD with ape and flac files and I accidentally damaged the disc. I copied the files to my computer and when I try to open the ape files, they won't play while the flac files does play. That's why I believe that FLAC is more secure.

That sounds like error robustness, because FLAC plays through errors.

Really? Can one specify which type of verification to perform? If so, how?

The -v option for the command-line codec seems to always use the thorough (slower) method. I'd like to be able to use the faster method if possible but MAC.Exe's help gives no indication that more than one method even exists.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=552199
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=552272
http://etree.org/shnutils/shntool/support/...4-b5/s4/mac.exe

Nice! Thanks for the information, skamp.

This depends on a few things such as the player, type of defect and compression level used. I'm not sure if it is now possible with foobar, but the in_APE plugin for Winamp has the ability to play through errors. So long as you aren't using the insane preset, you should be able to play through errors with ape files provided bytes are simply corrupt rather than missing. That said, the amount of data lost during playback of a corrupt ape file is far greater than that of a corrupt flac file, for example.

Hey greynol you were right, the in_ape plugin has an option to play through errors but since the option is not activated by default, the files that I had corrupted, won't play.