Monkey's Audio Review
Detailed Reviews
If someone wants to create (or simply store) an audio file on his/her
device, there's no shortage of file formats these days. Though MP3 is
the de-facto standard for those files, there're many others too. No
surprise that people often find audio files in many different formats on
their devices. And thanks to the versatility of media players these
days, it's also not a hassle – as long as you're not holding a lot of
.WAV audio files on your device.
WAVeform Audio Format, or WAV
for short, is a media format that can consume significantly higher
amount of storage space on your device than any other format. If you've
got some files in this format, you may want to compress them to save
disk space. And fortunately, there're special programs to help you do
that without spoiling the quality of your files. Here're we'll review
one such lossless audio compression program known as Monkey's Audio.
Let's see how powerful it is:
Getting Started
Setting Monkey's Audio is as easy as downloading a tiny 1.3 mb setup from their website and installing it. The software downloads and installs rapidly, and you can get rolling in less than a minute if you're on a high speed internet connection. For slower connections downloading part may take some time, but once downloaded it takes less than 30 seconds to install.
User Interface and Experience
When you launch the software you'll find yourself staring at a very simple and minimalist piece of software. There're not a lot of features, only a few medium-sizes buttons in the upper ribbon and a large white space below it with software's logo in the background. There's not any complicated UI that you can not understand at a glance – one look on the buttons and you'll get an idea of what to do next. You can add as many files as you wish by clicking the “Add Files” button. There's also a button to add whole folders right next to it.
Once you add the files, they show up in the white space. Compression can be started by clicking the “Compress” button. If you wish, you can also choose the level of compression that you want to be be applied from the button right after it. There're four options under that button:
- A
fast option, which is actually the lowest level of compression. It has
been named “Fast” probably because it compresses the file(s) in least
amount of time;
- A normal option, which is selected by default, and will take slightly more time than the fast option but will also provide a slightly more compact file in the end;
- A high option, which will compress more hardly than the options given above and as a result will consume more time;
- An Extra High option;
- And finally, an Insane option. This one will consume the most time for conversion, but in the end it'll provide you the most compact and highly compressed file.
- As you convert, the software shows progress
through a status bar in the bottom along with remaining time. The
buttons in upper ribbon disappear and they're replaced by two other
buttons – one for pausing the conversion and another for stopping it.
When file is compressed, it shows the size of compressed file along with
percentage of size reduction and time consumed in the white space.
Compression Quality
You'll find the compressed file in the folder of source file itself. The file will be in .APE extension, which can be opened easily with VLC media player. Now, as far as compression quality is concerned, you'll be glad to learn that its compression is indeed completely lossless. You won't be able to spot any difference between the sounds of both source and compressed files. In most cases it reduces the file size by something around 35% to 40%, which is impressive.
Conclusion
In the end we can say that Monkey's Audio is a very nice audio compression software because it gets the job done without involving much complexity. And it's very good at doing what it's supposed to do, because a 40% reduction in size without compromising a bit on quality is something that many other compression programs can only dream of. I highly recommend it for compressing .WAV format audio files.