How to play FLAC in iTunes
How To...
If you’re on a MAC and are using iTunes to manage your music library, you may have noticed that it will not handle FLAC (Free Lossless Audio CODEC) encoded files. FLAC encoded music is the defacto standard for reducing file sizes without loss of quality. FLAC files are bit-for-bit perfect copies at about half the file size.
iTunes will not recognize FLAC files and offer their own method of lossless encoding called Apple Lossless. Unfortunately, Apple Lossless doesn’t work with anything other than iTunes so that vast majority of people use FLAC and are forced to forego iTunes as their music player and library organizer for these files.
Now there is an easy way to fix this. There is a free program you can download called Fluke that fixes everything. Download FLUKE
Fluke is a plug in for your MAC. It’s simple to use. Once installed, you simply choose any FLAC encoded file or group of files and choose to open with Fluke. Fluke quickly converts the FLAC file identification tags to fool iTunes into thinking they are Quicktime files (Quicktime is Apple’s video format). This allows iTunes to recognize these and play them.
One last trick you may wish to know. If you want to copy these files onto a CD, iTunes won’t allow you to do this without yet another trick. While iTunes will now play the FLAC files for you, if you wish to copy these files onto a CD you’ll first need to convert them to WAV. To do this, simply highlight the files you wish to convert, right click the highlighted files and click on "convert to WAV". Now you have a bit perfect copy of the FLAC files in WAV. You can then add these to your playlist in iTunes and burn them onto a CD.
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