does itunes support .flac?

+1 for flac support in iTunes.

otherwise you might wanna use clementine, which supports flac flawlessly and is FOSS: http://www.clementine-player.org/

Apple, as always, supporting their own, killing the rest.

iTunes can currently read, write and convert between MP3, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC and Apple Lossless (.m4a). iTunes can also play any audio files that QuickTime can play (as well as some video formats), including Protected AAC files from the iTunes Store and Audible.com audio books. FLAC is a lossless format, meaning that FLAC files retain all the audio information of a song, unlike AAC or MP3, which remove some to compress songs to a smaller filesize. However, FLAC format is not a supported format by Apple’s software and devices, like iTunes. This guide from UFUShare.com tells how to convert FLAC AIFF, MP3, WAV, M4A, WMA, etc to to import, add FLAC to iTunes for easy play, open, read FLAC in iTunes.

How to Play FLAC Files in iTunes?

Jeff Blanding wrote:

Can iTunes play .flac files? Can it do so natively ...

no.

... or be modified to do so?

yes.

see this article.

Can it import .flac files, converting them to .mp3 or .mp4 or .aac or something?

what you can do is convert the FLACs to Apple Lossless files. either of these free apps can do that for you.

iTunesdoes not support FLAC, but you can use a converter to convert FLAC to AppleLossless or AIFF or MP3 to play it on your iTunes. Here is a nice article abouthow to import and add FLAC to iTunes. http://www.bigasoft.com/articles/how-to-import-flac-to-itunes.html

iTunes will convert FLACs to other formats, and can play them natively.

But only after a little bit of tweaking to fool iTunes into doing so. (Not supporting FLAC files is kind of a boner move by Apple, presumably to push their own Lossless format, but FLAC is open-source and royalty-free, so you do the math...)

Download Fluke and use it to install needed Quicktime components, then change the file extension from ".flac"

to ".mov" and you're done.

Oh, and Fluke is free and way easy to use.

More info here: http://www.macworld.com/article/142096/2009/08/play_wmaoggflac_itunes.html

I get a suspicious site warning when I click the link

Indeed, developer's site must've gotten hacked or something, as this wasn't the case before...

You can still download Fluke safely via mirrors at Versiontracker and MacUpdate. They both have the latest release.

It is kind of silly that Apple will not support FLAC.

It is very easy to convert FLAC to ALAC using ffmpeg:

M:\flac>ffmpeg -i "Miles_Ahead.flac" -acodec alac "Miles_Ahead.m4a"

ffmpeg is free - http://ffmpeg.org/download.html

you could try Fluke. I tried installing&reinstalling it and it just gives me an error. converting is silly, I guess I'll just have to stick with vlc.

I use FLAC to iTunes Converter. Works great!

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Yeah think of all the wasted application development time they spent removing the really cool features in iTunes 10.7 to make iTunes 11, when they could have added something actually useful like FLAC support. I keep masters of my super high quality stuff in FLAC and create copies in ALAC for integration with my iTunes play lists, but it's a pain since they are very large files (96khz 24-bit depth), and I waste a lot of drive space with essentially redundant data. BTW I'm happily back on iTunes 10.7 after suffering with 11 for more than a week. Got my Cover Flow back too! I can see the support for Audiophiles and local storage of our music files slipping away as Apple pushes people towards dependency and lock-in with iCloud. Apple used to be about power to the user and individuality. Now they just want us to buy into their master playlist of lossy audio.

ALAC is open-source and DRM free these days:

http://alac.macosforge.org/trac/browser/trunk/codec

No need to keep redundant FLAC & ALAC unless you actively play both file types on different platforms that are mutually exclusive to either format, because you can easily convert back & forth using free XLD

http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

Dependancies exists everywhere and with every choice you make every day. iCloud/iTunes Match is an option ( a great one for legalizing all those old subpar mp3 128k or < files you found on the internet over the years) no one forces you to make.

iTunes Plus (AAC 256k) may be lossy, but I'd challenge you to hear any difference between that and ALAC/FLAC on your mobile iDevice.

If you've invested in the Apple ecosystem, use ALAC for archiving and iTunes Plus for playing and *enjoy* the Music!

Fluke fluke.en.softonic.com/mac

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+1 for iTunes native support of FLAC

it doesnt work.