Why should I bother about Monkey’s Audio? Because many pirates good people offer classical music in this format (FLAC is quite rare and I’ve seen WavPack only once).
What I consider wrong in Monkey’s Audio design:
- No verson compatibility – each version alters decoding process
- Huge blocks – some megabytes is huge indeed (WavPack – 64k, FLAC – even less), hence inaccurate seeking and big memory requirements
- “Insane” profile – if it does not decode in realtime on my CPU that is unusable
What I consider wrong in MA implementation:
- There is only one implementation (with two known ports)
- It is not endian-safe (both generated WAV headers and < 3.92 decoding)
- OO in that case means “Object-Obfuscated” (i.e. too many files where you can’t easily find required code)
- Custom license
Maybe during GSoC somebody will write easily understandable portable decoder in Lavc that will allow playback of .APE in FFplay,MPlayer,VLC,Xine,etc. Otherwise I’ll have to do it myself.