With the intact audio coding, the APE format has occupied the hearts of most PC-HIFI friends. Because of its early launch, it is popular in China, but APE is not perfect:
1. APE is a personal work, and copyright issues will not be ruled out in the future;
2. At present, APE music can only be played on computers, and there is no mobile multimedia player or audio equipment to support it at present, so its use range is limited;
3. The most fatal point is that the APE file has poor fault tolerance. As long as there is a little error in the transmission process, the whole APE music will be invalidated.
So, do we have a better choice? Yes, it is FLAC. In foreign mainstream audio websites, FLAC is more respected.
Compared with APE, FLAC has the following advantages:
1. FLAC is an open source and completely free lossless audio coding and compression format. This music format with the same quality as CD is impeccable in sound quality, and any information of PCM audio will not be lost by FLAC compression. And you never have to worry about getting into a copyright lawsuit. Thanks to this, many audio processing software can input and output FLAC format files, which brings convenience to the post-processing of audio.
2. Compared with APE, FLAC's decoding complexity is lower (the decoding operation is small, only integer operation is needed), the decoding speed is extremely fast, and the calculation speed is very low, so it can easily realize real-time decoding and playback on very common hardware. FLAC is the only lossless compression coding supported by hardware at present. In the field of consumption, there are already mobile multimedia players, automobiles and home audio devices that support FLAC format, such as Rio Karma and iAUDIO U3 (available in China).
3. The streamable technology of FLAC is the most noteworthy point. It won't lead to errors in the whole file because of some errors. Just throw away the errors directly. FLAC has strong fault tolerance, and even if a small piece of music is damaged, it won't affect the later music playback. Therefore, FLAC is more suitable for long-term audio storage than APE.
FLAC has the disadvantages of slower coding speed and lower compression ratio than APE, but the overall gap is not big, for example, the capacity is about 3%, which is really nothing for the massive hard disks that are entering the dual-core era and are prone to hundreds of gigabytes.
personally, I prefer APE! ! ! ! ! ! !