FLAC Support

cazzzac44 wrote:

(as FLAC is the accepted standard for downloadable hi-res music

Is it?

Looks like I'll have to purchase a Dell XPS instead.

Thanks for letting us know!

Remember, the people responding to you here (and reading your post) are just regular Mac users, not Apple itself. We have no reason to bemoan your decision to buy a different make computer.

Apple decided to come up with ALAC instead of going with FLAC. It is unlikely they now see the need for additional support for another codec for a very small portion of the user market. Oh, I use FLAC for archiving copies of my CDs, but I like many others have no room for lossless music on the volume that holds my music collection. As such it makes no difference to me, and likewise many others in a similar position, that iTunes does not support FLAC although it is my preferred format for archiving.

Of course if you were determined to use a Mac you could convert the FLAC to ALAC to use iTunes. It's all lossless so it shouldn't make a difference to quality. Keep your backups as FLAC. Alternatively you could check out third party support such as Songbird.

Hello, I'm another user of the small portion of users who likes the flac format. Also 10 of my best friends. We would love Apple even more than now, if flac would be supported. 😍

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

The problem is Apple should see that ALAC is NOT going up in popularity outside of its own products. And it won't because FLAC is THE BEST codec for quality.

They don't see the need, but putting it in there wouldn't need much effort. If iTunes wants to be the absolute king why doesn't it add support for everything? Foobar2000 has been modded into syncing with Apple products and supporting all codecs.

Disappointing. iTunes should be much better managed. It would eliminate quite a bit of complaints.

AuronAXE wrote:

They don't see the need, but putting it in there wouldn't need much effort.

and if they don't see a need, why put any effort (aka $$) into it?

If iTunes wants to be the absolute king

+200 million users is nothing to sneeze at.

And nowhere has Apple said they want iTunes to be king (absolute or otherwise).

It's very easy to convert flac to alac.

Of course make sure you you have the latest xcode version for your system installed and the command line tools insstalled as well.

Download and install ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org/download.html or use MacPorts) then use the Terminal to use ffmpeg to convert them. Here's a short shell script that will do it:

#!/bin/bash

prog_name=$0;

for x ; do

   y=`basename "$1" .flac`

   ffmpeg -i "$1" -acodec alac  "${y}.m4a"   

   shift;

done

exit;

save that to /usr/local/bin, chmod 755, and then use flac2alac *.flac anywhere and it will convert them to Apple Lossless. Then just open the m4a filels in the Finder or you could do it with the command line:

open -a iTunes.app *.m4a

It would be nice to see iTunes support both FLAC and be a UPNP server.

You can convert flac to alac in two ways!

1- use ffmpeg by terminal with the command:

for i in *.flac; do newname=`basename $i .flac`.m4a; ffmpeg -i $i -acodec alac -map_metadata 0:0 $newname; done

Unfortunatly ffmpeg does not support 24-bit depth yet.

2- Use this free software: http://tmkk.pv.land.to/xld/index_e.html

The last one can be also used with command line:

for i in *.flac; do xld -f alac $i; done

🙂

Is it?

Yes, it is.

"Yes, it is."

Almost a year later & it still isn't the "accepted standard".

You can use Fission from Rogue Amoeba to convert FLAC to a good selection of formats that will work for you. If you choose AIFF or ALAC you should have a decent quality audio file. Keep your FLAC files in backup.

Alternatively buy FLACTunes off the App Store and use that. I have worked with both, they both work. I prefer Fission as part of a bundle from RA for some other stuff I need.

I am an audiophile myself, and I am looking to get all new equipment soon. Used to use Meridian 101/105 with Cambridge Audio and valve based CD player etc with analogue vinyl front end (not Linn though) and Magnaplanar speakers. So I have spent a fair bit of time playing with digital music.

Hope you got this sorted.

Does it matter Chris, some of us like to get the stuff in FLAC and we love our Apple kit too. The importanat thing for me is that as an audiophile AND Apple user I get top quality in the format I like it. Apple understands this, even though they do not support FLAC (hence lossless formats from Apple). Anyway, we should not have a debate about this, we should try and post good solutions so we all get joy and productivity from our kit.