Ape Lossless Audio

Extracting and Burning .ape & .cue files

Monkey's Audio .ape files are basically one large compressed .wav of an entire album.
A cuesheet is ususally included, which acts as a sort of playlist; telling your splitting program where it should break up the tracks.

There are several programs that can do this, but for this tutorial I'm going to use Exact Audio Copy, Monkey's Audio, and the LAME 3.90.3 mp3 encoder.
Follow the links to download the necessary apps if you don't already have them installed.

Okay, so you've downloaded a file from some p2p network (usually in some sort of archive, eg. rar) like this one.
Can't just burn it with Alcohol or something (yet) and you can't just perform a straight decompression with EAC (yet).
They don't know what the hell to do with an .ape file...so we go to

Monkey's Audio.

The interface is quite simple, and it's very easy to use. Just about all of the settings and functions can be accessed from the icon toolbar
across the top.
Click the Compress icon for a drop menu of available actions, and select Decompress. The icon will change to a little package
symbol with some arrows.
Now click the big floppy disk icon to Add Files that you want to decompress. This will be your .ape file. Browse to the directory location and select it, then click Open.
The file you seleted will now be displayed in the main window. Click the Decompress button and the Monkey will start unpacking the big .wav file.
By default, the extracted wav will be placed in the same directory that the source ape file was located.
Once it's done you can close Monkey's Audio, and it's on to

Exact Audio Copy

Actually, before doing this make sure that the wav file you extracted in the previous step is located in the same directory as the cuesheet that came with your ape file.
This isn't completely necessary, but it makes it a little easier to find it.
Ok, open EAC, and from the Tools menu at the top, select Split WAVs by cuesheet > With Gaps
The Browse window will open, where you navigate to and select your extracted .wav file...do that then click Open
Another Browse window will open for the location of the .cue file. Select it and click Open again.
EAC will do it's thing, and in no time you'll have all the tracks split up in .wav format.
The only thing left to do is encode them.

You can use any encoder you want, to convert to mp3, ogg, or whatever.
I like vbr mp3's, and I already have EAC set up to use the LAME encoder, so all I have to do is go to the Tools menu again,
this time selecting Compress WAVs, browse to the directory, Shift-select all the .wav's, and click Open.
EAC automatically queues them up for processing with LAME.

That's all!