So this begs the question: what is the advantage of APE? Does it claim better compression ratios or something?
Personally, I initially ripped all my CDs to FLAC. I then converted all of those to high bitrate MP3s, because MP3 is just easier to use in more places and on more hardware. The FLAC files were moved to a spare hard drive as a digital locker of sorts.
After hours and hours of work to do all this, I have never once gone back to those FLAC files, and I'm now using Google Music and rdio to play all my music anyway...
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Matt