If you are lucky the site that you have downloaded the music from is offering it in other formats as well. If not, your best bet is to convert the audio format into a supported one.

I have reviewed more than a dozen audio converters in the past. From Helium Audio Converter over Mobile Media Converter and Media Cope to Quick Media Converter and specialized tools such as Flac to Mp3.

FlicFlac is a free portable audio converter for Windows that supports several popular music formats including mp3, wav, ape, flac and ogg. It lacks support for other popular audio formats like aac on the other hand.

All you need to do to convert audio files is to drag and drop them into the drop area in the application window or click on the area to open a file browser.

Before you do that you may want to change the output format, Flac is selected by default, to another format. A click on the new format makes it the default output format for the conversion. You may also want to click on the settings button to make changes to the audio quality of the output or to integrate the audio converter into the shell to make it accessible in Windows Explorer. The latter allows you to convert audio files right from within the file manager.

Users can furthermore select to delete the input audio files after successful conversions. FlicFlac is definitely not the most complete audio converter but not all users need a program that supports all known audio files or offers editing options.

Portability and ease of use, those two are the biggest strengths of FlicFlac. Windows users can download the latest version of the audio converter from the developer website.

The audio analyzer Audiochecker can verify the origin of APE, FLAC, SHN, WAV and LPAC audio files and determine if the music is indeed in lossless format or a fake. Version 2 of the audio software is currently available as a beta download. The program is portable and can be executed directly after unpacking its contents to the computer.

Directories, files or tracks from audio CDs can be selected for the audio analysis and verification. Audio Checker can crawl subdirectories if the user enables the option in the program’s settings.

The speed of the audio analysis depends mainly on the computer’s processor. It usually takes several minutes to verify one music album.

Audio Checker displays the results during the scan. Each analysed audio file is highlighted in green or red. A green audio file passed the test while a red one failed it. Percentages are shown that define how close to the original the audio files are.

The developer of audio checker is constantly improving the audio analyzer. Latest plans are the addition of the wavpack format. Audio Checker is multi-lingual and compatible to most versions and editions of the Windows operating system.

Update: The program has been discontinued.

The big advantage of lossless compression formats is that no information is removed from the audio stream while lossy compression formats such as mp3 loose information. It depends on the music player if and how you can play ape files. I would like to describe it for three popular music players, those are XMPlay, Winamp and Windows Media Player.

All three do not support ape files by default which means that we have to use plugins to add the support to the players. Lets start.

XMPlay:

Download the Monkey’s Audio input plugin for XMPlay and place the extracted downloaded files into the main XMPlay directory while XMPlay is not started. The plugin will be automatically recognized during the next start and from then on music in the ape format is supported by XMPlay.

Winamp:

Again, we have to rely on a plugin to add ape file support. The plugin is called Monkey Audio Winamp Plugin and comes in executable format. Just run the file after downloading it and it will automatically install itself in the correct Winamp directory. Winamp can then play ape files normally.

Windows Media Player:

Download and install the DS Monkey Audio Filter which adds ape support for any DirectShow based player including Windows Media Player. The filter can be downloaded with an installer, just run the installer and support should be added automatically.

Read More:

Monkey’s Audio input plugin for XMPlay
Monkey Audio Winamp Plugin
DS Monkey Audio Filter (for Windows Media Player)

If you do not have a software that supports plugins you could use the excellent freeware Burrn which supports many formats which are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets as well as embedded cuesheets for ape, wv and flac files. It reads the tags automatically and adds them to the burning process. Burrrn is really easy to use, it supports drag and drop and direct editing of song title and artist.

You will have to choose a burner the first time it starts. Once this is done the main window opens and you may add new songs to the CD by dragging songs or cue sheets to the main window.  If you want a certain order for your files you have to drag them one at a time. Last but not least it offers a way to adjust the replaygain for all songs before the songs are burned to the audio cd.