I haven't read the forum for over a year, but a quick search revealed little information about possible support for ape? Any comments?

Nope. No support at all and it's highly improbable it will ever have it in the official builds. Ogg and FLAC in the betas for v3 but thats it for new formats.

mlord has said that it *should* be possible to add new formats if somebody is willing to hack it into the kernel. The kernel would present the decoded data as a WAV to the player.

Is there any easy way to transcode and automatically keep the tag info?

Yes: dBpowerAMP Music Converter.
You'll have to download and install the illustrate-made codec plugins for dMC from the Codec Central page.

Thank you very much. Your words were well spent.