Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: APE format support on Android platform (Read 3351 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

APE format support on Android platform

Hi,

I use foobar2000 on both my PC and Android device. I know I could install a plugin to decode APE format file on PC. However, I could not find any documentation about doing the same on Android platform. Could you support APE format on Android platform? Or is there anyway I could install the plugin for foobar2000 mobile?

Thanks

Re: APE format support on Android platform

Reply #1 –
Just convert your APE files into FLAC, WavPack, ALAC or some other lossless codec you prefer. APE is lossless anyway so there's no quality loss, and people shouldn't be using APE to begin with because it's not open source (unlike FLAC/WavPack/ALAC) which is the main reason foobar doesn't come with a a native APE decoder, and to make things worse, APE is very slow to decode due to its poor compression algorithm.
Codec enthusiast!

Re: APE format support on Android platform

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Elias on
Just convert your APE files into FLAC, WavPack, ALAC or some other lossless codec you prefer. APE is lossless anyway so there's no quality loss, and people shouldn't be using APE to begin with because it's not open source (unlike FLAC/WavPack/ALAC) which is the main reason foobar doesn't come with a a native APE decoder, and to make things worse, APE is very slow to decode due to its poor compression algorithm.
Building upon this reply (making some specifications), FLAC should be the preferred format that you transcode your APE to as it is by far the most commonly used and supported codec. FB2K desktop should be able to do this, with some alternatives being ffmpeg, beets, or whatever program you prefer the most.
 

Re: APE format support on Android platform

Reply #3 –
Quote from: a42a2747 on
Building upon this reply (making some specifications), FLAC should be the preferred format that you transcode your APE to as it is by far the most commonly used and supported codec. FB2K desktop should be able to do this, with some alternatives being ffmpeg, beets, or whatever program you prefer the most.
I disagree on FLAC. While it's true that FLAC has the highest compatibility and decoding support in most players and operating systems, WavPack is clearly a much better codec in every way, WavPack is still being developed (unlike FLAC which really hasn't seen any new features in years), WavPack has better compression, can encode SACD/DSD files (which makes WavPack pretty much a universal audio codec) and WavPack's decoding support has reached a point that WavPack is ready for use nowadays. Moreover, WavPack uses APEv2 tags, whereas FLAC uses Vorbis comment, and APEv2 is a clearly better tag format, and is also used by various other audio codecs (Musepack, OptimFROG, APE and so on), so APEv2 has become more or less an open standard among audio tags. And then there's lossy WavPack, which is cool too. And WavPack is open source too, so there are no real issues with WavPack.

Going by your logic, we should all stick to mp3 for lossy, because mp3 is the most widely supported lossy codec out there. While codec support does matter, it shouldn't be the only criteria one uses to determine which codec to use.

By the way, disregard my previous comment about ALAC; I can't really recommend ALAC, because while open source, ALAC is abandonware and Apple hasn't sorted out its bugs (if you for example, encode a FLAC to ALAC, sometimes it happens that the new ALAC file gets a different time length than the original FLAC, and similar issues). Also, ALAC is a non-MPEG-4 codec and so by that alone it shouldn't be used in the mp4 container. Apple was just being lazy about ALAC and released ALAC because they didn't want to support FLAC. It's a good thing that Apple eventually open sourced ALAC but ALAC is just not a good lossless codec.

That said, what's wonderful about lossless codecs is that we can always get rid of proprietary codecs and convert our APE/OptimFROG/ALAC audio library to an open source lossless codec, that simply works better, and without any quality loss thanks to the original file being lossless.
Codec enthusiast!