MA on extra high has a better compression ratio than FLAC's highest setting. They're using MA 3.99, not the newest release (which is a major one).Ĭonsistently, I got significantly better compression with MA (not just ~2%), and while MA did take longer, it was not very significant (I'm using a pretty low-end machine to boot). More accurate, but not the most accurate. The more recent comparison on FLAC's site yields a more accurate picture. Irrelevant, since I compared them using my music and the latest version of each (MA 4.01 and FLAC 1.20). The numbers on MA's site are really outdated Personally, I don't think the positives (~2% better compression) outweigh the negatives (longer encode time, higher CPU use when playing, less software/hardware support). The licensing issue is also why so many software programs support FLAC (XMMS, Winamp, AlsaPlayer, Y! Music Engine, MacAmp Lite, dBpowerAMP, Foobar2000, QCD, Apollo and more.) That plus the licensing issue is why no hardware supports MA but lots of it supports FLAC (like Squeezebox, Sonos, PhatBox, Kenwood MusicKeg, iAudio, ReQuest, Olive, Escient, TrekStor, and more). Decoding a Monkey's Audio file compressed with the high setting takes three times the CPU power of decoding a FLAC file.

Decoding a Monkey's Audio file compressed with the fast setting takes twice the CPU power of decoding a FLAC file. The downsides on the Monkey's Audio don't end with the longer encode, though. or you can get a slighty higher compression ratio (~2%) with Monkey's Audio on high but it'll take over 50% longer to encode. So, you can get equivalent compression with FLAC default and Monkey's Audio on fastest. Monkey's Audio 3.99 (fast): Avg compression ratio of 53.1% taking 10:32.11 to encodeįLAC (default): Avg compression ratio of 53.7% taking 10:19.61 to encode Monkey's Audio 3.99 (high): Avg compression ratio of 51.5% taking 15:45.41 to encode Compressing 77 minutes of a variety of music yielded: The numbers on MA's site are really outdated (they use FLAC 0.1). Average compression ratio is quite close.

Download monkey's audio ma