What are APE and FLAC formats?
The compression methods of music file format include lossless compression, lossy compression and mixed compression. MPEG and JPEG belong to mixed compression. If compressed data is restored, the data is actually different. Of course, the human ear is indistinguishable. Therefore, if MP3 and OGG formats are restored from compressed state, there will be loss.
But even if the APE format is restored, the original sound quality can be preserved without loss. Therefore, APE can be compressed and restored without losing treble texture. Of course, at present, only music CDs and tracks in uncompressed WAV files can be converted into APE format, while MP3 files cannot be converted into APE format. In fact, the compression ratio of APE is not high. Although the sound quality is well maintained, the compressed capacity is not much smaller. A 34MB WAV file, compressed into APE format, and about 25MB. For the whole CD, the capacity saved by compression is still considerable.
APE is actually a lossless compressed audio format. Huge WAV audio files can be "slimmed down" by the software Monkey Audio and compressed into APE. It is often used for network audio file transmission, because the compressed APE file capacity is less than half of the WAV source file, which can save transmission time. More importantly, the WAV file obtained after decompression and restoration of monkey's audio can be exactly the same as the source file before compression. Therefore, APE is called "lossless audio compression format" and Monkey's audio is called "lossless audio compression software". Unlike using professional data compression software such as WinZip or WinRAR to compress audio files, compressed APE audio files can be played directly. The monkey's audio will install an "in_APE.dll" plug-in in Winamp, so that Winamp can also play APE files.
FLAC is the abbreviation of Free Lossless Audio Codec, which can be interpreted as lossless audio compression coding in Chinese. FLAC is a famous set of free audio compression coding, which is characterized by lossless compression. Different from other lossy compression codes such as MP3 and AAC, it will not destroy any original audio information, so it can restore the sound quality of music CD.
In short, FLAC is similar to APE, that is, audio is compressed by FLAC without losing any information. This compression is similar to Zip, but FLAC will give you a higher compression ratio, because FLAC is a compression method specially designed for the characteristics of audio. You can play FLAC compressed files with the player, just like you usually play your MP3 files (there are many car players and home audio devices that support FLAC now, and you can find these devices on FLAC's website.
FLAC is free and supports most operating systems, including Windows, "UNIX" (Linux, * BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2 and Amiga. FLAC also provides a building system based on development tools autotools, MSVC, Watcom C and Project Builder.
Because these two formats are lossless compression formats, the requirements for hardware are naturally much higher than those of general formats, which is nothing for computers, but it is not easy for players such as walkman, so it is very good to support the hardware configuration of players with dual lossless formats.