Will iTunes ever support 24bit FLAC?

lord-sam wrote:

I want to play 24-bit FLAC files using iTunes. Is this likely to be supported soon?

Soon? No. Ever? Who knows.

Your best bet for the moment is to convert your files to Apple Lossless. Apple Lossless can be played by Windows Media Player, Foobar, WinAmp, dbPowerAmp, VLC, etc. etc. (some times an addon is required).

I have all my music in Apple Lossless and shared from iTunes to Windows Media Player and Microsoft Media Center. Windows 7 with WMP12 can even read the meta-tags in Apple Lossless files including the embedded artwork. You do need to install an additional codec to enable this.

The problem with FLAC is that not many artist support it. However, there are AIFF files, which is Apple's alternative to Microsoft's WAV. They use the same sample rate as WAV does. And it supports up to 16-bit.

Apple Lossless is now open-source, so the FLAC fanatics can no longer use that excuse to continue to resist using Apple Lossless.

Apple Lossless can already be used in WinAmp, dbPowerAmp, VLC, Foobar2000, and Windows Media Player amongst many others.

AIFF is poorly supported by Windows Media Player, and WAV is almost as badly supported in iTunes, Apple Lossless on the otherhand can be used fully in both iTunes and WMP, including support for meta-tags including now embedded artwork even in WMP.

You can convert the FLAC files to Apple Lossless and as the name suggests not lose any quality. On a Mac the best utility to do this is XLD and can be downloaded from here http://tmkk.pv.land.to/xld/index_e.html this utility even converts the meta-tags at the same time.

I believe the typical way Windows people would do this conversion would be by using WinAmp or dbPoweramp.