Monkey’s Audio
Compress your music without compromising, with this lossless compression format.
The ubiquitous mp3 file has one major drawback: it's a ‘lossy’ system. What you get back is not what you put in. For casual listening on the less than audiophile quality of the typical PC sound system, you probably don’t notice, unless you overdo the bit rate. If you’ve a more exacting sound system and an ear for such things then mp3’s can sound like the CD’s poor cousin with various digital artefacts spoiling things, rather like the odd blocks and fringes that can mar a JPEG image.
Monkey’s Audio does things differently. All its compression methods aim to reduce the file size while leaving the original data intact. As you might expect you can’t get anywhere near the high compression ratios offered by mp3 and its stable mates. You’ll achieve between 50and 60 per cent compression, not startling, but it does mean you can fit considerably more on your hard drive.
There’s support for Media Center and Winamp, so you can play straight from the compressed files. If you shudder at the idea of losing data to the mp3 format but blench at the size of wav files then Monkey’s Audio is just what you need.
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