Monkeys Audio

[kayabe]

would you mind adding support for ape, Monekys Audio?

[mackron]

I assume you mean decoding of .ape files? So having a Monkey's Audio decoding backend which uses their official SDK? I won't be doing that because of a few reasons:

1. I have a lot of projects I want to work on, but not enough time to work on them, yet this is the first I've even heard of Monkey's Audio. It's just not high on my priority list.
2. Although it sounds pedantic to some, one of the big "features" (if you can call it that) of mini_al is it's clean licensing. Everything in this repository is in the public domain. When you starting mixing in projects with their own license conditions like this one it just gets messy and confusing and just adds unnecessary licensing friction.

How widely used is Monkey's Audio? As I said earlier, this is the first I've heard of it!

Thanks for your suggestion!

[kayabe]

https://github.com/evpobr/libape

this project is using MIT License, does it make a difference?

[mackron]

It helps. I'm not going to outright reject the idea, but there's still a few practical problems. There's still a lot to do in mini_al (not to mention in my other projects I want to get done!), and that stuff is just higher priority right now (macOS/iOS support, improved format conversion, submixing, 3D audio, optimizing, etc, etc). Also, keep in mind that decoding isn't actually the main goal of mini_al - it's mainly intended to simplify lower-level audio playback and capture across the major platforms.

For anybody out there whose listening, is there anybody else who wants/needs this?

[r-lyeh]

Some (personal) remarks :

• APE is a lossless codec, about 2%/5% better than FLAC. (*)
• APE is slower to encode/decode than FLAC, though. (*)
• APE uses a custom license that most if not all companies should evaluate very carefully. It is one of the main reasons is banned from Linux distros IIRC.

In my opinion you could make a wrapper for the SDK and could give it some decoding support in a dr_ape.h file, but seems useless to me.

I'd better ask @kayabe why he needs APE and can't use FLAC instead :)

See: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison

[raysan5]

macOS/iOS support, improved format conversion, submixing, 3D audio, optimizing, etc, etc

I think this is already a loong list...

[kayabe]

i understand, i think you should prioritize optimizing then