[ Have you (or anyone else in this list for that matter) had any [ experience with Monkey's Audio (APE file extension) [ (http://www.monkeysaudio.com) ? It sounds like it's similar to [ FLAC (http://flac.sourceforge.net). I have certainly heard of Monkey's Audio ".ape" - but have never used it. My initial experience was with shorten ".shn" - it did not support AIFF, so I added that feature to the open source project. But I soon ran into shorten's limits, since I have a lot of 24-bit audio files which shorten does not support. FLAC proved to be much better, but it is only the second lossless format I have used. My initial research came up with a reasonably long list of options, including APE, SHN, and FLAC. When I first started, it was difficult to locate programs which supported these formats on BSD Unix or Mac OS X. Perhaps APE is PC-only? I don't remember. FLAC seems to be the best and most widespread. I understand that there are even car stereos and portable personal music devices which support FLAC. Brian Willoughby Sound Consulting