Have not tested this software on my equipment as yet so this is
a 'heads up' and not a recommendation. Source is available and
Monkey is free W9x/NT compatible software. Approximately a 3
meg download. 

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central-monkeys.htm 

and 

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/ 

You can also integrate with Exact Audio Copy 

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/theory.html 

According to the Monkey website WinAmp and a few other players
do support the .APE file playback. First time I've heard of
.APE files but apparently they aren't all that new? 

I've read the 'theory' page and it appears to be using the
NyQuist random sampling method followed by one I'm not familiar
with called 'Rice'? 

If I am understanding the first part of the compression
algorithm in use there _would_ be losses but not in the same
fashion as MP3 which literally drops bits and therefore cannot
restore to the original or even close to the original WAV. 

NyQuist doesn't dump any information but does 'approximate' and
attempt to 'predict' values which means after creating an .APE
file using Monkey's decompression back to the WAV file would be
a 'close approximation' of the original and not an exact binary
duplicate. 

Easy enough to find out by using a binary file-compare utility
but I haven't gotten around to it yet. :-\ 

>
>        ,                                        ,
>      o/      Charles_Angelich  - DOS Ghost       \o       ,
>       __o/
>     / >  www.undercoverdesign.com/dosghost/faf/  < \   __\__
  

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