The below article remains for archive purposes.  You can now easily convert APE directly to FLAC with ffmpeg.

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# One command per ape... 

ffmpeg -i inputname.ape outputname.flac 

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You may recall with great excitement my post on splitting and tagging album length FLAC files into track length FLAC files.  It may come to pass that you find yourself staring at an album length APE file.

What?  What the hell is an APE file?

In short, some folks decided “hey, what the world needs is another media player and it’s very own lossless codec”.  In their defense, MediaMonkey looks like a pretty cool application (say “iTunes killer”), and it does support FLAC and OGG so I don’t dispise it.  Nonetheless, it is my advice to avoid specialized and proprietary codices wherever possible.  Unfortunately Monkeys, this means no APE files.

As fate would have it, if you are already set up to split and tag an album FLAC, you are nearly ready to do the same for an album APE.  You just need the MAC (monkey audio codec).

You have two choices.  This codec isn’t part of what Canonical normally provides, so you can either add a repository which includes it or you can download the codec directly.  I tend to prefer adding a repository, but the codec can be downloaded in this package.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~aidanjm/mac-3.99-u4_b3-1_i386.deb

(If you choose to download the .deb package, double-clicking on it once you have downloaded it and your system will run the installation.)

For those of you, like me, who prefer to add a repository, the Eudoxos repositories include MAC, so we can add this one.

http://ppa.launchpad.net/eudoxos/ubuntu yourubuntuversion main

Once you have added that repository Monkey Audio will appear in Synaptic.  To install the Monkey Shite open Synaptic and look for Monkey Audio. (Please note that newer editions of this repository no longer carry the MAC, yet I am using the repo for 8.10 in my 10.04 machine successfully.)

Now let’s get to the meat of it.  I have grown lazy and tend to rename my FLAC, APE, and cue files to the letter a, so my commands look like this:

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# Here are the two commands you will need

shnsplit -o flac -f a.cue -t "%n – %t" a.ape

# Note: you may substitute "%n - %a - %t" if you want artist names in your file names

# now you may move or remove the album APE]

cuetag a.cue *.flac

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Unlike splitting a FLAC file into smaller flac files, you don’t necessarily have to send the album length APE to the trash (or remove it’s file extension) between performing these two commands.  But you can.

If this isn’t strait forward, you may want to read through my previous post to sort out the details of the conversion process and then come to this post for the APE specific information.

Thanks to this post for some information.