APE vs FLAC

These seem to be the two main lossess compression codecs. I've been
comparing them, and APE seems to be more efficient and FLAC better
supported. FLAC was known to (my versions of) Nero and WinAmp already.
APE can be made known to WinAmp with a plugin and file type
association; there is also a dll for Nero which is supposed to be a
plugin, but I haven't found anywhere to put it to make it work.
Another problem with APE is that it is actively being developed. All
in all, I like APE but FLAC seems to be safer and more convenient for now.

Anyone else have a point of view on this?

> These seem to be the two main lossess compression codecs. I've
> been comparing them, and APE seems to be more efficient and
> FLAC better supported. FLAC was known to (my versions of) Nero
> and WinAmp already. APE can be made known to WinAmp with a
> plugin and file type association; there is also a dll for Nero
> which is supposed to be a plugin, but I haven't found anywhere
> to put it to make it work. Another problem with APE is that it
> is actively being developed. All in all, I like APE but FLAC
> seems to be safer and more convenient for now.
>
> Anyone else have a point of view on this?

Monkey's Audio does seem better-performing based on...

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/All.htm

...and its modes seem the best-behaved of any codec -- for
example there's no apparent reason to use anything less than
maximum compression as far as FLAC decompression is concerned.

But this is only one test scenario, on an old machine. And
my confidence is not inspired by the fact that reversing one
of the axes on the graphs would commensurate distance from
the origin with efficiency. Also, his speed axis isn't
scaled the same as his size axis...

His results are seemingly confirmed by this comparison...

http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

...but here we see that FLAC is way faster, which is an
important in hardware support. Also note that Monkey's
Audio is not streamable (one of the FLAC design goals).
It's also a quasi-commercial venture.

-Carl