Audio Software Editing Monkey's Audio

Monkey's Audio Monkey's Audio 8.67 for Windows

by Matthew T. Ashland

Avg. Rating 4.6 (132 votes)

File Details

File Size 1.9 MB
License Freeware
Operating System Windows 7/8/10/Vista/XP
Date Added
Total Downloads 13,391
Publisher Matthew T. Ashland
Homepage Monkey's Audio

Publisher's 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. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space.

Latest Reviews

oompoop

oompoop reviewed v4.36 on Oct 20, 2018

Typ:
HEUR/QVM42.1.A621.Malware.Gen
Scan-Engine:
QVM II AI-Engine
Dateipfad:
C:\#Test\MAC_436.exe
Dateigröße:
1.49M (1,562,032 Byte)
Dateiversion:
Dateibeschreibung:
Monkey's Audio Setup
MD5:
f9a7cfc3bffab89a9a88e3d1c017b57b
Vorschlag:
Dateien in Quarantäne

???

FatBastard

FatBastard reviewed v4.12 on Jun 27, 2013

Monkey's Audio achieves better compression than the other lossless formats but is less compatible than FLAC with mediaplayers.

Artem S. Tashkinov

Artem S. Tashkinov reviewed v4.11 on Jan 22, 2013

One of the best

Nicky Dallen

Nicky Dallen reviewed v4.06 on Jul 6, 2011

With a little bit of time and effort, Monkey's Audio lets you have "the best of both worlds" as far as quality, restorability, and ease-of-use is concerned (sorry, that should be the best of three worlds!). I like the fact that Monkey's Audio files sound GREAT when played back from my desktop's soundcard into my home Hi-Fi (Denon Amplifier and Speakers, the good quality of which I think speak for themselves). By keping back-up copies of Monkey's Audio APE files on a different hard drive (either as straight copies from one drive to another, or imaged with Powerquest Drive Image), you can be certain of bit-for-bit quality restorations, should the drive with your original WAVs fail.And Monkey's Audio is easy to use, follow the suggested routine for compressing your files (High and Extra High are perfectly acceptable for those of you with audophile ears), and you won't go wrong.

Thanks to Monkey's Audio and Media Monkey (as my audio player) and some spare hard-drives, I'm in the process of re-ripping my CDS and re-building my music library to replace all my 64-bit MP3s. Some CDs will have to be "begged", "borowed" or "stolen" again to do this, or else just left as 64-bit MP3s if Ican't get hold of the originals CDS again, but from now on, Monkey's Audio and Media Monkey will be" the way to go" as far as building up my music library is concerned.

Here's my suggested routine for using Moneky's Audio as a tool for archiving all your music, whilst enabling great quality playback with Media Monkey. I agree it is perhaps "overkill" given that I use three hard dtives, and keep copies of both WAVs and APE files on them, but whenever was prevention never better than cure?

Hard Drive 1/Master Music Library. All CDS are (will be) ripped onto here, and stored as WAVs. I use a combination of CDex or Media Monkey to rip CDs as WAVs, but any other propriety programme which keeps WAVs as 1440 will be fine. Once the WAVs have been copied to Hard Drive 2 and had the Monkey'sAudio treatment on Hard Drive 2, the original WAVs are winzipped,and stay on Hard Drive 1. This hard drive is periodically "imaged" with Poweerquest Drive Image onto Hard Drive 3, as a back-up which can be easily restored, should Hard Drive 1 ever fail.

Hard Drive 2/Music Library Processing. WAVs from Hard Drive 1 are copied onto here (just straight copying of the files) and processed by Monkey's Audio. Once processing/compression is complete, the WAVs are deleted, and the APE files are the ones which will comprise my music library. Copy the processed APE files onto another hard drive, so that you have them as backups to restore from, should Hard Drive 2 ever fail.

Hard Drive 3/Music Library (Media Monkey as my music player). This is the drive on which all my APE music/ Media Monkey playlists will reside. If you ever need to create an audio disk for a friend and they can't play ape files, well just go back to Hard Drive 2 and uncompress the Monkey's Audio APE files back to WAVs, and then use whatever MP3 programme you want to creat an MP3 disk or audio disk so that Windows Media Player (for example) can play them with.

Hey presto! A routine that I'm finding works for me. Hope this helps. For a free programme that some would say "does eaxctly what it says on the tin", I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anything else that offers so much in terms of security. No problems so far, and I think providing you keep your wits about you, and regular backup (straight copying to elsewhere or via an "imaging" programme), you should be able to enjoy your music for many years to come!

anomoly

anomoly reviewed v4.06 on Mar 18, 2009

Not true, it says 406 (& I run it portably)

Darkman00

Darkman00 reviewed v4.06 on Mar 17, 2009

after installing 4.06 package .. - program still says 4.05

anomoly

anomoly reviewed v4.03 on Jan 22, 2009

Doesn't much matter, as lossless you can easily unpack (with this) and use flac or whatever compression you like.

JEdwardP

JEdwardP reviewed v4.02 on Jan 21, 2009

With WavPack having a better feature set, and TAK now yielding virtually the same compression level at faster encoding speeds, there mightn't be much point in continuing this CODEC. For those who've committed large collections to the format and therefore might find it impractical to abandon, however, it's good to see it rise from the dead.

DG

DG reviewed v4.02 on Jan 21, 2009

What a surprise! The famous program returns from obscurity! Good news.

runningfool

runningfool reviewed v4.01 Beta 2 on Jul 26, 2007

monkeys audio encoder compresses at about a 5% better rate than FLAC. unfortunately .ape files dont include support for replaygain or multichannel audio. there are also a significant number of reports that monkeys audio files become corrpted at a much faster rate than any other mainstream audio format.

Avg. Rating 4.6 (132 votes)
Your Rating

Someone reviewed v on Mar 19, 2023

Pros:

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Bottom Line:

Someone reviewed v on Jul 5, 2022

Pros: 555

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Bottom Line: 555

oompoop

oompoop reviewed v4.36 on Oct 20, 2018

Pros:

Cons:

Bottom Line: Typ:
HEUR/QVM42.1.A621.Malware.Gen
Scan-Engine:
QVM II AI-Engine
Dateipfad:
C:\#Test\MAC_436.exe
Dateigröße:
1.49M (1,562,032 Byte)
Dateiversion:
Dateibeschreibung:
Monkey's Audio Setup
MD5:
f9a7cfc3bffab89a9a88e3d1c017b57b
Vorschlag:
Dateien in Quarantäne

???

FatBastard

FatBastard reviewed v4.12 on Jun 27, 2013

Monkey's Audio achieves better compression than the other lossless formats but is less compatible than FLAC with mediaplayers.

Artem S. Tashkinov

Artem S. Tashkinov reviewed v4.11 on Jan 22, 2013

One of the best

Nicky Dallen

Nicky Dallen reviewed v4.06 on Jul 6, 2011

With a little bit of time and effort, Monkey's Audio lets you have "the best of both worlds" as far as quality, restorability, and ease-of-use is concerned (sorry, that should be the best of three worlds!). I like the fact that Monkey's Audio files sound GREAT when played back from my desktop's soundcard into my home Hi-Fi (Denon Amplifier and Speakers, the good quality of which I think speak for themselves). By keping back-up copies of Monkey's Audio APE files on a different hard drive (either as straight copies from one drive to another, or imaged with Powerquest Drive Image), you can be certain of bit-for-bit quality restorations, should the drive with your original WAVs fail.And Monkey's Audio is easy to use, follow the suggested routine for compressing your files (High and Extra High are perfectly acceptable for those of you with audophile ears), and you won't go wrong.

Thanks to Monkey's Audio and Media Monkey (as my audio player) and some spare hard-drives, I'm in the process of re-ripping my CDS and re-building my music library to replace all my 64-bit MP3s. Some CDs will have to be "begged", "borowed" or "stolen" again to do this, or else just left as 64-bit MP3s if Ican't get hold of the originals CDS again, but from now on, Monkey's Audio and Media Monkey will be" the way to go" as far as building up my music library is concerned.

Here's my suggested routine for using Moneky's Audio as a tool for archiving all your music, whilst enabling great quality playback with Media Monkey. I agree it is perhaps "overkill" given that I use three hard dtives, and keep copies of both WAVs and APE files on them, but whenever was prevention never better than cure?

Hard Drive 1/Master Music Library. All CDS are (will be) ripped onto here, and stored as WAVs. I use a combination of CDex or Media Monkey to rip CDs as WAVs, but any other propriety programme which keeps WAVs as 1440 will be fine. Once the WAVs have been copied to Hard Drive 2 and had the Monkey'sAudio treatment on Hard Drive 2, the original WAVs are winzipped,and stay on Hard Drive 1. This hard drive is periodically "imaged" with Poweerquest Drive Image onto Hard Drive 3, as a back-up which can be easily restored, should Hard Drive 1 ever fail.

Hard Drive 2/Music Library Processing. WAVs from Hard Drive 1 are copied onto here (just straight copying of the files) and processed by Monkey's Audio. Once processing/compression is complete, the WAVs are deleted, and the APE files are the ones which will comprise my music library. Copy the processed APE files onto another hard drive, so that you have them as backups to restore from, should Hard Drive 2 ever fail.

Hard Drive 3/Music Library (Media Monkey as my music player). This is the drive on which all my APE music/ Media Monkey playlists will reside. If you ever need to create an audio disk for a friend and they can't play ape files, well just go back to Hard Drive 2 and uncompress the Monkey's Audio APE files back to WAVs, and then use whatever MP3 programme you want to creat an MP3 disk or audio disk so that Windows Media Player (for example) can play them with.

Hey presto! A routine that I'm finding works for me. Hope this helps. For a free programme that some would say "does eaxctly what it says on the tin", I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anything else that offers so much in terms of security. No problems so far, and I think providing you keep your wits about you, and regular backup (straight copying to elsewhere or via an "imaging" programme), you should be able to enjoy your music for many years to come!

anomoly

anomoly reviewed v4.06 on Mar 18, 2009

Not true, it says 406 (& I run it portably)

Darkman00

Darkman00 reviewed v4.06 on Mar 17, 2009

after installing 4.06 package .. - program still says 4.05

anomoly

anomoly reviewed v4.03 on Jan 22, 2009

Doesn't much matter, as lossless you can easily unpack (with this) and use flac or whatever compression you like.

JEdwardP

JEdwardP reviewed v4.02 on Jan 21, 2009

With WavPack having a better feature set, and TAK now yielding virtually the same compression level at faster encoding speeds, there mightn't be much point in continuing this CODEC. For those who've committed large collections to the format and therefore might find it impractical to abandon, however, it's good to see it rise from the dead.

DG

DG reviewed v4.02 on Jan 21, 2009

What a surprise! The famous program returns from obscurity! Good news.

runningfool

runningfool reviewed v4.01 Beta 2 on Jul 26, 2007

monkeys audio encoder compresses at about a 5% better rate than FLAC. unfortunately .ape files dont include support for replaygain or multichannel audio. there are also a significant number of reports that monkeys audio files become corrpted at a much faster rate than any other mainstream audio format.

Earwicker

Earwicker reviewed v4.01 Beta 1 on Apr 7, 2007

This is amazingly good. Very fast (compresses a 750 MB WAV in ~ 70 seconds at "High" on my AMD 3200+), compression in the order of 35 % (of original size)... for some reason, playing back the APE files through Foobar2000, if anything they sound better than the original WAVs - I don't know if it's something to do with APE's error correction? This is playing back through a serious high-end audiophile hi-fi too, I can hear the difference.

Anyway, this is marvelous, works a treat, means you can store thousands of CDs on your HD without loss, and back up ~ 20 CDs on a 4.5 GB DVD. Holy crap that's good!

MickyFoley

MickyFoley reviewed v4.01 Beta 1 on Jan 17, 2006

never thought of version 4 since now. i saw this project dead on ground :( also xid i thought is dead.
bit so, i see, that it's going on :)

monkey audio is just to reduce unnessecary resources. never think of it, that it can compress audiofiles like ogg or mp3.

monkey is a lossless compressor, that cuts only a little bit :)

Registered

Registered reviewed v4.01 Beta 1 on Jan 9, 2006

just wondered does version 4 increase the speed,

as i found wav pack 4.32 is so much faster than monkey 3.99 was, i know ape gives a +3% in compression over wav pack, but wav pack is about 40% - 60% faster then ape (depending on your CPU capability) wav pack tends to be optimized for p4's and athlons XP's.

if any body knows, i would test things myself, but with a baby to take care of, i don't get the chance any more to play hehehe.

sn0wflake

sn0wflake reviewed v4.01 Beta 1 on Jan 8, 2006

vikingen: Does version 3.99 work with Windows ME?

Bachalor

Bachalor reviewed v3.99 on May 4, 2004

Thx for this freeware, works good and good compression.

ghammer

ghammer reviewed v3.99 on May 3, 2004

The best lossless compression gets even better!

vikingen

vikingen reviewed v3.98 Alpha 1 on Dec 26, 2003

Sorry,
Can not give more than 1 * for this. It does not work with Norwegian WinMe on a laptop. I've tried several types of .wav-files (pcm, raw, acm). Will only get I/O-error.

ghammer

ghammer reviewed v3.98 Alpha 1 on May 30, 2003

For those who wonder why you would use this "because it does not compress 5 to 1". I have my music on my computer and like it to be perfect sound. Not a good compressed version. I also have a MP3 portable and a car player. I like to create MP3 compilations for those and at different rates (256 CBR and 192 VBR). Having a lossless file on my computer allows me to easily create MP3 CDs without having to get 60+ audio CDs out and rip one or two tracks from each.
For those who claim that an Ogg or other lossy file is just as good. Naaah! Ain't no way sport. Good, but not great. And when going to another or same format at a different rate you will lose more sound. Not a good idea. You only have a tiny hard drive? Get a bigger one or quit trying to use digital music. Simple.

netean

netean reviewed v3.98 Alpha 1 on May 30, 2003

IMO monkey's audio is superior to FLAC for several reasons:
1 - filesize (monkey's audio has always been smaller in my tests)
2 - MOnkey's audio comes with a decent interface, FLAC is command line and the 3rd party front ends are dismal
3 - Monkey's audio is a better name than FLAC :)

FLAC does have the whole open source thing going for it for sure, but open source of not, Monkey's audio is free and IMO better.

QQ

QQ reviewed v3.98 Alpha 1 on May 30, 2003

I'm not so sure this is THE BEST lossless compression scheme in the world, as some of you are. How about trying http://flac.sourceforge.net, which is now a part of Xiph (-> Ogg Vorbis/Theora/Speex)

Oh, and it's open sourced too.

greenkiwi

greenkiwi reviewed v3.98 Alpha 1 on May 29, 2003

I'd rate it a 6, if I was able to. Monkey's Audio is a great program. Some people use if to archiving your CDs. I find that it is the perfect tool for listening to CDs in my home stereo. With its lossless quality and the cheap hard drives that are now available, I am using it for my home stereo source. One 200GB drive will store aprox. 350-400 albums... so I get two drives and have my 700 cd music collection stored at my fingertips. Then you just get a good sound card, (read NOT A SOUND BLASTER, as they and many other consumer grade cards resample from 44.1KHz to 48KHz and have poor DACs to boot) like the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 ($150). And presto...

I've found that I start to hear music that I haven't heard in a year or two. It's revolutionized my listening.

roj

roj reviewed v3.98 Alpha 1 on May 29, 2003

I have nothing but good things to say about this application, although I do wish the author would clean up some of the niggling interface bugs (note: the compression itself is flawless).

Somnambulator

Somnambulator reviewed v3.97 RC1 on Jul 9, 2002

im sorry, but i miss the pt of lossless compression. i know what it is, always have, but whats the point if the file is only 30-40% smaller? why not just copy the cd and put it in a safe place, now that's "__archiving__" music. cd-r's are 20 cents a pop, and if you dont have a burner, then you arent a music buff anyway. if your gonna save a 50 meg wav file as a 35 meg monkey file, why not put the music you want on a cd-r and be able to hear it without decoding it on the computer? you can even save the wav as a super high quality, 320 kbps, mp3 or better yet, 256kbps ogg file? you'll never hear the difference b/w a top-quality ogg and the original wav, esp with the human ear, let alone a program, and the file will be ~10x smaller, not 1.3x smaller.
oh, and i DO "__archive__" music, so dont give me that "thick skull" crap.
but if you do happen to like loss-less comp, monkey's is def the best choice

Tux0Racer

Tux0Racer reviewed v3.97 RC1 on Jul 9, 2002

I'll wait for Human's Audio. Hopefully it will have evolved by then.

rodneyreid

rodneyreid reviewed v3.91 Beta 1 on Aug 13, 2001

There is another way: compress with the RK compressor.

I took a single .wav (Vladislav Delay's "Holiday") which weighs in at 65,066kb, and reduced it to 25,797kb lossless.

However! RK is for people with 200 year lifespans and 1ghz computers: Compression/Decompression is awful slow. Normally bright humans would/should use Monkey Audio instead.

Androo

Androo reviewed v3.89 Beta 2 on Jun 29, 2001

If you're looking for the best lossless compression, you can find it here.

Atherean

Atherean reviewed v3.89 Beta 2 on Jun 29, 2001

it'll never achieve average compression ratios of 5:1, because it's lossless compression. get that notion through your thick skulls, dear reviewers. this program is mainly intended for _archiving_ you music, backing up your cds etc, when you can't rely on lossy algorithms.

mecolik

mecolik reviewed v3.89 Beta 2 on Jun 29, 2001

If you are looking for lossless audio compression on Windows platform, I think it is the best.
Very handy when used with Exact Audio Copy.

Karateka

Karateka reviewed v3.89 Beta 1 on Jun 25, 2001

It is definitelly a step in the right direction but until it can do 5 to 1 compression or better, there really isn't a point in using the program. If you have space for the compressed files, you have space for just good old .wavs.

slo

slo reviewed v3.89 Beta 1 on Jun 25, 2001

U r an idiot mate....this is LOSSLESS audio compression' not like mpeg1(layer1-3),VQF,AAC,mp3pro,ADPCM and list goes on on lossless compression codecs/apps....MonkeyAudio is definetly best LOSSLESS compressino app for wavs on planet(winamp plugin support!) it only lack a full ACM codec...(btw, from the common' compressors RAR-with mm cmpr on is the best)

Latz

Latz reviewed v3.87 Beta 2 on Mar 27, 2001

Hey, waht's this program about? COmpressing? Well, my 54 MB wav file melted down to 32MB... Great now I can archive 1 and a half CD on one CDR.
Folks, this program sucks... I wish I could give zero points.

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