Monkey's Audio is also supported on Linux and OS X using JRiver Media Center or Plex.Ī GPL-licensed version of the Monkey's Audio decoder has been independently written for Rockbox and is included in FFmpeg. As of version 4.02 (19 January 2009) a DirectShow filter is distributed with the installer, allowing for compatibility with most media players running on the Windows operating system. Officially, Monkey's Audio is available only for the Microsoft Windows platform. Since all of these formats are lossless, users can transcode between formats without generation loss. Other lossless codecs such as FLAC and WavPack are also available under open source licences, and are well supported in Linux distributions and in many applications. On 10 August 2023, with the release of version 10.18, Monkey's Audio switched to the Open Source Initiative-approved 3-Clause BSD Licence.

In comparison, most lossless codecs are asymmetric, meaning that the work done to achieve higher compression ratios, if selected by the user, slows down the encoding process, but has essentially no effect on the decoding requirements. Many older portable media players, and even older smartphones, have difficulty handling this. While Monkey's Audio can achieve high compression ratios, the cost is a dramatic increase in requirements on the decoding end. Relative to FLAC, Apple Lossless Audio Codec, or WavPack, Monkey's Audio is slow to encode or decode files. The upside is that no data is lost compared to the input file, making lossless codecs suitable for transcoding, or simply taking up approximately half as much space as raw PCM data. Like any lossless compression scheme, Monkey's Audio format takes up several times as much space as lossy compression formats - typically, about twice as much as a 320 kbit/s bitrate MP3 file.

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