Monkey's Audio to FLAC
 

I've got an album I wanna put on my Rockboxed iPod, but Rockbox only supports FLAC, not APE. I don't have much experience with ripping audio or conversion (Most of my own albums are ripped via LAME mp3, using a guide from My Stuff), so I really don't know where to begin.

So, any suggestions?

Just use the Monkey's Audio program to decode the files back to WAV, then use a FLAC encoder to encode to FLAC...

I think Foobar might be able to do so as well, if it has the APE and FLAC plugins.

Also dBpowerAMP can do it. It might be faster that way, since Foobar will require you to manually download and install the APE plugin.

Last time I used dBpowerAMP it was just as much a hassle to get the plugins. Is APE and FLAC now part of it without additional downloads?

Yes dBpowerAMP should come with Monkey's Audio and FLAC decoders/encoders, so you can use it right away to transcode your music. Now that the foo_ape.dll is stable, Monkey's Audio playback/encoding is now default with foobar2000 and comes with the installation. So, either option is fine and is completely up to you.

That's weird, I have the latest version of Foobar and had to manually download the DLL. Oh well, at least it's working now. Then again, I don't use APE, but do need to decode them to FLAC a few times a year... ;)

dbpoweramp lets you do it straight from the explorer context menu, too.

Converting APE to WAVE and then to FLAC is pointless because there are so many free and easy programs to convert directly and keep tags. foobar2000 and dbPoweramp are two of many easy to use programs.

yea.... foobar2000 works just fine

it just needs to know where the flac encoder is

I like using the actual APE program to do it since AFAIK the others don't also test the files while decoding... ;)