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Play FLAC in iTunes with less mess

Since switching to the Mac full-time last year, my only remaining complaint has been the abysmal (and finicky) FLAC support in iTunes. FLAC, or Free Lossless Audio Codec, is an open source lossless compression format that offers a nice compromise betweeen storing the uncompressed music file -- which is very large -- and converting the file to a lossy format like MP3 or AAC. Apple has its own lossless format, Apple Lossless, and Apple Lossless is great -- but I have lots and lots of live performances archived in FLAC and haven't wanted to spend the time converting all those files so that I can play everything in iTunes. About 6 months ago, I pretty much gave up and started just ripping CDs in Apple Lossless and using Max to convert favorite albums or performances.

Reader Mitchell wrote in and told us about Fluke, which aims to be an easier way to play FLAC files in iTunes. I've used other XiphQT based solutions, but none have worked as well as Fluke. Install Fluke and then open up a FLAC file with it (or drag your FLAC files to the icon) and it automatically runs a script that tricks iTunes into adding a FLAC file to the library. For the most part, tagging and even album art will be converted -- though I did have to add track numbers to some of the files I tested. It isn't as seamless as an actual FLAC player, like Cog, but it is certainly more hassle-free than some of the other script-based solutions I've used in the past.

Fluke is free and available for download here.

Thanks Mitchell!

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Audio Software iTunes

Since switching to the Mac full-time last year, my only remaining complaint has been the abysmal (and finicky) FLAC support in iTunes....
 

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Edu Camargo

Great atempt, but seems that it only works partially. How come?

I prefer moving away in favor of independent and more relyable implementations. I am a Windows user and, I enjoy music in flac using Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org). The most decent support for FLAC I found there. No delays on importing or whatever, gapless playback, support for embedded cuesheets (suitable for making a chapterised flac audio), full support for vorbis comment metadata, embedded and external album art support. Winamp has also a great FLAC support, with a limitation: Its main window and its media library can't deal with multiple values, e.g. if your flac file has multiple artists or multiple composers, its media library and main player just reads the first. Yet, in the edit file info window you can see all the present fields. Although Illiminable offers a great solution for those who want to play their flacs with Windows Media Player, it doesn't give support for tags, and the only one that seems to give some sort of support for FLAC metadata, the WMP Tag Support Extender, crashes. Seems that fluke is in the same position, right?

I'm planning to go for Mac OSX futurely, and seems that great alternatives are in store for mac, like Cog (http://cogx.org) or Play by sbooth.org. If you guys use one of these tools, some aditional tips for the new comer are pretty well appreciated. I think that FLAC has more relyable solutions where it may fit in. Fortunately, there are great people giving their contributions for the increasing popularity of FLAC, and I'm sticking with it, instead of waiting for a solution from a major company, or forcing the app to do what at the present moment it is not capable of doing. That's why the alternatives are for.

Long-live high fidelity!

Peace,

Edu Camargo.

November 10 2008 at 8:08 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
caleb

ROCKBOX!

November 08 2008 at 4:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
PistolPeet

Christina: Give firefly a go, it shows up as a bonjour-compatible iTunes network server and transcodes the FLACs automatically. It also means you don't have to do anything extra to add music, just tell firefly to auto scan your FLAC folder every x minutes and the music will show up when you next click on the entry in the Shared section of iTunes.

It's not perfect (doesn't show number of times played, album art seems to be missing) but it's very easy to use.

August 14 2008 at 3:22 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to PistolPeet's comment
Christina Warren

Thanks for the tip -- I'll definitely give it a shot.

August 14 2008 at 4:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
vijay kate

fluke works real well-been using it for a while, though it's easier to convert flac to apple lossless, to put it on ipod. however, though fluke lets one play flac easily with itunes, it does not support album artwork
mike, flac works damn well, nothing shoddy about it, robK's got it right. not supporting flac makes it that much more convenient for peeps to buy from itunes store, ergo more $ for apple

August 13 2008 at 10:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mike

FLAC is open source fail. Possibly one of the reasons that Apple hasn't implemented FLAC in iTunes is that there is no full, comprehensive documentation on FLAC. How do you fully implement something when there isn't documentation on it? I'm actually glad Apple has left out support for this shoddy, half-implemented codec.

August 13 2008 at 8:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to mike's comment
Hermes

Hmm, Fluke does not appear to work as described. Dialog box comes up I hit 'yes' to add to iTunes and nothing is actually moved.

August 13 2008 at 6:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Hermes's comment
pyite

Same here. Received an error on initial launch, then nothing.

August 17 2008 at 7:30 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
cpb

why would i want something which is "less hassle-free"??

:p

August 13 2008 at 6:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tuaw

TwistedFLAC for teh win!

http://twistedwave.com/TwistedFLAC.html

Uses MacFUSE to make all FLAC files show up as WAV's and can be played or converted by anything that reads WAVs (everything). Plus it keeps meta-data. I installed it a few months ago and stopped using anything else.

KRS Juan
CapsGetPeeled.com

August 13 2008 at 6:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to tuaw's comment
Simon Arch

Interesting. What's the performance like?

August 14 2008 at 4:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bob Mc

Call me when you find a way to allow my iPod to play back FLAC files. Until then, I'll use XLD to convert them to Apple Lossless.

August 13 2008 at 5:30 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Bob Mc's comment
Christina Warren

True enough -- I still have to run xACT or Max if I want to listen to lossless, but there are very few albums I won't just convert to LAME V0 for portable audio.

If you have pre-Classic iPod (so up to Gen 5.5), you can install the alternate firmware Rockbox (http://www.rockbox.org/) which will play a ton of formats in addition to FLAC.

August 13 2008 at 7:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Gordon Werner

I always use xACT for this purpose

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21952

August 13 2008 at 5:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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