Drop any file to identify it
No upload. No signup. No sending your file halfway across the internet.
We tell you what it is, right here in your browser.
Drop it!
Let go to identify this file.
Couldn't identify this file
Need to convert it? fwip it →
Monkey's Audio compresses audio more aggressively than FLAC — typically 5-10% smaller files — but demands significantly more CPU power to decode. The tradeoff made it popular in the mid-2000s when storage was expensive and CPU cycles were cheap relative to disk space. Today, storage is cheap and FLAC's lighter decoding is generally preferred.
The format found its largest audience in Chinese music sharing communities, where it became a de facto standard for lossless music distribution. If you download lossless Chinese music from forums or sharing sites, there's a decent chance it's in APE format, often paired with a .cue file for track splitting.
Foobar2000 is the best player for APE files on Windows. VLC handles it too, though some older versions struggled with high-compression APE files. For maximum compatibility, convert to FLAC — the conversion is lossless (perfect bit-for-bit audio preservation) and FLAC is supported essentially everywhere.