What is a .APE file?
APE is a Monkey’s Audio file, a popular lossless audio compressor.
- Did you know
- Monkey’s Audio achieves high lossless compression at the cost of slower encoding.
- Monkey’s Audio was written by Matthew T. Ashland and first released in 2000 as a free lossless compressor.
- Its source-available licence was deemed incompatible with open-source rules, so projects like FFmpeg ship an independently written decoder.
- What Analyser reads
- Identify many more audio formats: lossless/hi-res codecs (Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, TAK, True Audio, DSD/SACD, Musepack), pro containers (Core Audio, RF64/BW64, Wave64, Sun AU, Broadcast Wave with timecode), speech/mobile (Speex, AMR-WB, QCP, 3GA, M4R, GSM), MPEG Layer I/II, instrument banks (SoundFont, SFZ, DLS, RIFF MIDI, GigaStudio), ringtones (RTTTL, iMelody, SAP), tracker modules (MOD, XM, IT, S3M, OctaMED, 669, Oktalyzer), chiptunes (NES NSF, SNES SPC, VGM, Game Boy GBS, AY, YM) and Audacity projects.
- Depth of analysis
- .APE is an identification-grade format: Analyser recognises it from its bytes and decodes the header metadata it carries, rather than opening it in a full viewer. Formats that do get a full viewer are marked "Full" on the formats page.
- Open a .APE file
- Drag a .APE file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It is identified entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.