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Monkey's Audio

 

Monkey’s Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music. Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or wma that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music. That means it always sounds perfect – exactly the same as the original. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. The other great thing is that you can always decompress your Monkey's Audio files back to the exact, original files. That way, you'll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you'll always be able to perfectly recreate the original music CD.

Compression Level
There are a couple of things to keep in mind when choosing a compression level. First off, higher compression always comes at the cost of speed - this means during compression, decompression, and playback. For this reason, it may not always be the best to simply pick "high" or "extra high." "Normal" is a pretty good trade-off between speed and compression. The jump from "normal" to "high" only saves around 6mb on a full audio CD. This savings may not be worth the extra time involved. The jump from "high" to "extra high" is even bigger, and only saves another few mb's a CD. This mode is only recommended when compression is totally crucial. Also, if you listen to your music while you use your computer, you may want to keep in mind the CPU usage differences between the options.

Sample Rate
Sample rate is the number of samples of audio carried per second, measured in Hz or kHz (1000 Hz). 44.1 kHz is the sampling rate of audio CDs and 48.0 kHz is commonly used for professional video. Higher sample rates result in higher quality audio with larger file sizes. Setting this to Auto will create an output file with the same sample rate as the input file.

Bit Depth
Bit Depth defines the numer of bits (1's and 0's) used to represent each sample. By increasing the bit depth, quantization noise is reduced improving the signal to noise ratio. For each 1-bit increment in bit depth, the S/N will increase by 6dB. 24-bit digital audio has a theoretical maximum S/N of 144 dB, compared to 96 dB for 16-bit. Audio CDs use a bit depth of 16 bits. 24-bit is common in professional audio and video environments.