OK, I have got some quite old backups of my audio CDs in APEs (created under Windows years ago). Would like to have them in Oggs of fairly low quality so that they do not take too much space. That page looks promising:
http://lossless2lossy.sourceforge.net/
It states you will need oggenc and MAC for such a conversion.
So...
1. For oggenc (a part of vorbis-tools)
sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools
2. And the MAC thingy? Well... seems there were some licensing problems with that and it is no longer in the official repos. So download it from
http://members.iinet.net.au/~aidanjm/mac-3.99-u4_b3-1_i386.deb
(as stated in http://aidanjm.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/using-monkeys-audio-ape-files-in-ubuntu/ which seems to be the root here, see also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/119412 for the license problems discussion; even some PPA repo is mentioned there)
and install, e.g. by means of GDebi or
sudo dpkg -i mac-3.99-u4_b3-1_i386.deb
3. Download lossless2lossy:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lossless2lossy/files/
4. Put it somewhere in your PATH (~/bin for example) and...
chmod u+x ~/bin/lossless2lossy-v1.21
ln -s ~/bin/lossless2lossy-v1.21 ~/bin/lossless2lossy
5. Convert the whole stuff, saving intermediary wav files to /tmp and not retaining them
lossless2lossy ogg vbr 1 ~/music/ape /tmp ~/music/ogg nosave
Quite recently support for MonkeyAudio has been added to ffmpeg - to be checked...
