Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for

lossless Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...

audio data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...

. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike

lossy compression In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...

methods such as

Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate. AAC has been stan ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conj ...

, and

Opus ''Opus'' (pl. ''opera'') is a Latin word meaning "work". Italian equivalents are ''opera'' (singular) and ''opere'' (pl.). Opus or OPUS may refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * Opus number, (abbr. Op.) specifying order of (usually) publicatio ...

. Therefore, it may be decompressed to a file that is identical to the source material. Similar to other lossless audio codecs, files encoded to Monkey's Audio are typically reduced to about half of the original size, with data transfer time and storage requirements being reduced accordingly.

Comparisons

Like any lossless compression scheme, Monkey's Audio format takes up several times as much space as lossy compression formats. Typically, about twice as much as a 320

kbit/s In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits (bitrate), characters or symbols (baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are multi ...

bitrate In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (bitrate or as a variable ''R'') is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. The bit rate is expressed in the unit bit per second (symbol: bit/s), often in conjunction ...

MP3 file. The upside is that no data is lost compared to the input file, making lossless codecs suitable for transcoding, or simply taking up approximately half as much space as raw PCM data. Relative to FLAC,

Apple Lossless Audio Codec The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. ...

, or

WavPack WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. It ...

, Monkey's Audio is slow to encode or decode files. Although Monkey's Audio is distributed as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

, it is not open source. Among other things, the source code license terms make it impossible to legally redistribute, and invites people to infringe on the

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

license of other software. This is not compatible with ''

The Open Source Definition ''The Open Source Definition'' is a document published by the Open Source Initiative, to determine whether a software license can be labeled with the open-source certification mark. The definition was taken from the exact text of the Debian Free ...

'' or The Free Software Definition as stated by the

Open Source Initiative The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation,_with_501(c)(3).html" ;"title="110. - 6910./ref> is a type o ...

and

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...

, respectively. Alternatively, FLAC and WavPack are available under open source licences, and are well supported in

Linux distributions A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

and in many applications. Since all of these formats are lossless, users can transcode between formats without

generation loss Generation loss is the loss of quality between subsequent copies or transcodes of data. Anything that reduces the quality of the representation when copying, and would cause further reduction in quality on making a copy of the copy, can be consid ...

. While Monkey's Audio can achieve high compression ratios, the cost is a dramatic increase in requirements on the decoding end. Many older portable media players, and even older smartphones, have difficulty handling this. In comparison, most lossless codecs are asymmetric, meaning that the work done to achieve higher compression ratios, if selected by the user, slows down the encoding process, but has essentially no effect on the decoding requirements.

Supported platforms

Officially, Monkey's Audio is available only for the Microsoft Windows platform. As of version 4.02 (19 January 2009) a

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's ea ...

filter is distributed with the installer, allowing for compatibility with most media players running on the Windows operating system. Monkey's Audio is also supported on Linux and OS X using

JRiver Media Center JRiver Media Center is a multimedia application that allows the user to play and organize various types of media on a computer running Windows, macOS, or Linux operating systems. JRiver Media Center is a "jukebox"-style media player, like iTu ...

or Plex. A GPL-licensed version of the Monkey's Audio decoder has been independently written for Rockbox and is included in

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

. This code also provides playback support in applications that use

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes the ...

, as well as

DeaDBeeF DeaDBeeF is an audio player software available for Linux, Android and other Unix-like operating systems. DeaDBeeF is free and open-source software, except on Android. History The player was first published in August 2009. Its author cited ...

. A number of players and rippers support the format as well. It is also available as a port and package on FreeBSD. Monkey's Audio files can be encoded and decoded on any platform which has a J2SE implementation, by the means of the unofficia
JMAC library
which is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

licensed under the

GNU LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

Hardware support

Monkey's Audio is supported natively on all modern

Cowon Cowon Systems, Inc. (simply known as Cowon) is a South Korean consumer electronics and software corporation. The company’s initial focus was software development and microelectronics, specializing in speech synthesis and speech recognition tec ...

multimedia media players, the

FiiO X Series The FiiO X Series is a line of portable music players designed and manufactured by the Chinese company FiiO Electronics Technology. Models * All models support digital audio sampled up to 192 kHz with samples of up to 24 bits. * All mode ...

and some Cayin digital audio players. On other hardware platforms, the open source firmware project

Rockbox Rockbox is a free and open-source software replacement for the OEM firmware in various forms of digital audio players (DAPs) with an original kernel. It offers an alternative to the player's operating system, in many cases without removing the or ...

supports playback of Monkey's Audio files on most of its supported targets, but many lack sufficient processing power to play them on the higher compression settings.

References

External links

Monkey's Audio
Official Website
APE Player
Play Monkey's Audio files {{Compression software implementations Lossless audio codecs Software that uses GStreamer

Comparisons

Supported platforms

Hardware support

See also

References

External links