GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 99784
FEATUREREQUEST: .ape support
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Monkey's Audio (.ape) is a totally free "highly optimized and highly efficent" *lossless* audio compression format. According to the website (http://www.monkeysaudio.com) it features "Freely available source code, simple SDK and non-restrictive licensing - other developers can easily use Monkey's Audio in their own programs -- and there are no evil restrictive licensing agreements" This format is already widely used on various audio binary newsgroups and IMHO would be an asset to Rhythmbox.
We are generally positive about adding new formats, but considering that the library hasn't even been ported to Linux yet I doubt this one will be added in the very near future. Pathes to add a plugin for it is of course welcome. Leaving the bug open, but don't hold your breath waiting for this plugin cause I don't see it being done by any of the current core hackers before june/july at the best.
Ok, mailed with the author of monkey's audio and got his permission to make GStreamer plugins. I am a bit worried however if our GPL licensed applications will have legal issues when using this.
This thread may be relevant: http://www.monkeysaudio.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=Developers&action=display&num=1029850282
This needs gst plugins before. Reassigning.
It would not be a legal problem to write a plugin for GStreamer and distribute it seperately. I don't know about Gst-Plugins stand on licensing though. I do believe we license every plugin seperately, so that would not be a problem either. I do however not know if gst-plugins (would) include non-Free plugins. This decision would be interesting for the .rm plugin, too. Another problem is that the current decompress API of the monkeyaudio lib does only operate on files, but not on buffers. Last but not least it's currently windows only.
Ok, .ape encoder and decoder plugins commited to CVS HEAD. Credit goes to Jeremy Apoc.
Thanks Jeremy - this really rocks! Now we'll be able to encode and decoded losslesly through gstreamer :)