How Slacker play APE ??
 

this might be topic discussed over and over again,MPlayer supports APE by default and Amarok doesn't, but I wonder if that's how Slackers do coz i don't really don't want to mess up with ffmpeg..

FFmpeg has an ape decoder so most software that uses a recent enough libavcodec can playback ape files: Audacious and vlc spring to mind...

I'd use one of the many tools to convert .ape to .flac (or .wv if you prefer).

Ape isnt that great a lossless codec, and the licence is ridiculous.


http://www.monkeysaudio.com/license.html

deadbeaf in SBo;
or compile a Phonon backend which supports ape and set it as backgend. I used mplayer before.

thanks for your reply, could you please recommend a effective tool can convert .ape to .flac? ta

You can use shntool: http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.37/audio/shntool/

'shntool conv -o flac *.ape'

just tried it out, pretty neat, convert 500m APE to FLAC in about 30 sec, it requires mac(Money Audio Codec) pre-installed though. Thanks!

shntool is good WAVE data processing utility, but what if I want to convert FLAC/APE to splited ogg/mp3 files with .CUE file in shell, like what GUI(K3b) can do does, so I can play different tracks in Album?

I normally use soundconverter (Gtk) or soundkonverter (Qt).

I dont get why people transcode from terminal at all. By the time you've opened a terminal and typed the commands, you could have got a GUIed transcoding program up and started.

good point, its just whether can do or not in my opinion I suppose. curiosity drives people do thing like this especially in Linux, isn't it? :)

1) Some people have a terminal open all the time, and typing a quick alias may indeed be faster
2) Automation. When I rip CDs I just type cdrip, which runs abcde with the desired options (outputting to a predefined directory with a standard name format) and automatically prompts me with the CDDB entry to verify it is correct. I can't imagine a GUI would be faster.

[/off-topic]

In part. Though when yuo see 'this is how you transcode' posts with terminal commands, can be because of the 'cant be bothered/too difficult to write a 'how to' using a GUI' problem. There is also a percentage of users who have a 'real users do it from command line' approach.

1-IMO it would only be faster if you are a good typist, don't typo any commands, and remember exactly where the files to be transcoded are located.
2- Ripping and transcoding arent the same thing. Its much easier to automate ripping. Not that I would rip from the terminal either, but it makes more sense than transcoding.

Tab completion basically eliminates the need to be a good typist, and a good bash alias or small script keeps track of most-used options. You'd have to locate the files from a GUI anyway, so I don't understand why it would be so difficult to find them with coreutils...
You (usually) encode when ripping, which requires choosing a proper codec along with suitable codec options. Transcoding is hardly a completely different thing. I automated transcoding of TiVo-encrypted video files on a server at one point with little difficulty (and it would have taken far longer to do it manually in a GUI). As long as you keep naming/tagging conventions consistent you can automate tasks easily (pull info from tags or the filename, pass as options to the new encoder). If you do something once or rarely, it is not worth the effort to try and learn command-line syntax. If you do something often or with many files, automation is a time saver. If you're not willing to learn to automate and/or write shell scripts, then the question of CLI efficiency is moot.

Transcoding audio can be complex, if you want to do it right.

If you've got a consistent naming convention and paths, always do the same task (eg .flac-> .mp3 V0), yeah, it is possible to automate it various ways. Its not so bad if you do lossless-> lossless or lossless-> lossy transcodes , its if you start doing lossy-> lossy transcodes you need to be a lot more careful. I've seen people do 128/160/192K WMA to V0/320K MP3 transcodes plently of times. Even if you are transcoding from MP3 to MP3 you have to be careful....some of the encoders are awful (I've blind tested LAME MP3 V2 as 'sounding better' than xing 320K CBR)

IIRC it is possible to get the codec/bitrate/encoder from command line, but now you've got another step. It also throws automation out the window.

Not that many people have a consistent naming convention. I've got one of the neater audio collections I've ever seen, but even I have various albums/files with 'non-standard' naming conventions for various reasons.

If it works for you, go ahead, use a command line to transcode. I dont, and I've done more transcodes than is sane. ;)

And interestingly enough abcde has just today received support for Monkey's Audio (ape) :)