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Synopsis:

Learn how to play FLAC encoded music files in iTunes and your Apple portable devices such as the iPhone, iPod and iPad.

Let's Begin:

Serious audiophiles demand high quality sound from their system, and in the digital age, that means lossless encoding of music. Thanks to plunging prices of disk drives and Internet bandwidth, gone are the days when people were forced to encoded music in low quality, low bit-rate compressed mp3 files. High compression is no longer needed thanks to large capacity and inexpensive disk drives, and that means that lossless storage of music on your computer is easily affordable.

One problem however, is that many sites that offer downloads of high quality sound files use the FLAC format. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec and can reduce the original sound files by as much as 50-60% without any loss of quality. FLAC is an open and royalty-free format which makes it very appealing for music distribution. The glitch here is that so far Apple has chosen not to support FLAC in iTunes in favor of its own Apple Lossless format. The good news is that because both FLAC and Apple Lossless are of course lossless formats, that means that conversion between the two can be done without any loss of quality of the music being converted.

There are a number of converter apps available. One such app is the free X Lossless Decoder or XLD (donation requested). To get your FLAC files into iTunes, simply setup XLD to use Apple Lossless in its Output Format pop-up and then drag the files to be converted onto the icon. That’s all there is to it. You can even configure XLD to automatically add the converted files to your iTunes library when it’s done. And since Apple Lossless is of course supported on the Apple iPhone, iPod and iPad, your converted songs will sync and play on all those devices letting you enjoy the high quality lossless encoding of your music everywhere you go.