.ape is "Monkey's Audio" form of lossless audio compression. With an ape file u can either play it with the suitable decoder or extract the .wav (uncompressed and therefore lossless) audio data. If you want other formats such as mp3, i'd suggest that you get the original .wav file, then use the preferred encoder to encode/compress that wav. and i'd reccomend the monkey's audio's own application to extract the wav.
