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| To Heaven |
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Ape Format
http://www.monkeysaudio.com/
Features:
* Efficient (fast and great compression) – Monkey's Audio is highly optimized and highly efficient
* Perfect sound – absolutely no quality loss, meaning it sounds perfect and decompresses perfect (it's lossless!)
* Media Center™, Winamp™, and more support – supported by many popular players and rippers
* Easy – the Windows environment interface is both powerful and easy to use
* Free – Monkey’s Audio is completely free!
* Error detection – Monkey’s Audio incorporates redundant CRC’s to ensure proper decompression of data (errors never go unnoticed)
* Tagging support – Monkey’s Audio uses its own extremely flexible APE Tags so you can easily manage and catalogue your Monkey’s Audio collection.
* External coder support - you can use Monkey's Audio as a front-end for all of your encoding needs
* Freely available source code, simple SDK and non-restrictive licensing - other developers can easily use Monkey's Audio in their own programs -- and there are no evil restrictive licensing agreements
Description:
Monkey’s Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music. Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or lqt that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music. That means it always sounds perfect – exactly the same as the original. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. (think of it as a beefed-up Winzip™ for your music) The other great thing is that you can always decompress your Monkey's Audio files back to the exact, original files. That way, you'll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you'll always be able to recreate the original music CD if something ever happens to yours.
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Flac Format
http://flac.sourceforge.net/index.html
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.
FLAC is freely available and supported on most operating systems, including Windows, "unix" (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. There are build systems for autotools, MSVC, Watcom C, and Project Builder.
See the features page for a complete list of features, or the comparison page to see how FLAC compares with other lossless codecs.
The FLAC project consists of:
* the stream format
* reference encoders and decoders in library form
* flac, a command-line program to encode and decode FLAC files
* metaflac, a command-line metadata editor for FLAC files
* input plugins for various music players
When we say that FLAC is "Free" it means more than just that it is available at no cost. It means that the specification of the format is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance), and that neither the FLAC format nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any known patent. It also means that all the source code is available under open-source licenses. It is the first truly open and free lossless audio format.