How to get iTunes to play FLAC

DONE IT!!!

Audirvana has a method whereby it imports flacs into itunes via a proxy file - see page 10 of their manual on how to do this.

There appears to be one caveat at present and I've told them about it - you have to have the flacs on the computer's hard drive.

I originally had the flacs on my NAS drive and Audirvana could not link the proxy to the file.

The Audirvana interface identifies the file being played as flac

Sounds fantastic - and I no longer have to convert - bluddy brilliant :-)

Audirvana support was fantastic - same day response with a problem resolution!

How's them Apples! :-)

Oooops - forgot to thank you all for your input

FYI . I had been converting to AIFF using MAX and it worked very well - now I can save a step :-)

UPDATE - it appears there are a few glitches with Audirvana...

If you put some titles in a playlist and let it cycle round - when it returns to the start it plays the track at half speed

Selecting a track outside of the playlist fixes that.

Provided feedback - hopefully a fix will be coming

Back to the toons :-)

I think CHANNEL D's Pure Music does this.

Good luck,
Soren

The best solution is to use software other than iTunes if one isn't dependent on it for some reason. Many software packages offer Airplay if that is important.

I have most of my library in FLAC but a good portion in AIFF. AIFF is a nice solution all around if storage and transcoding isn't a big deal. I own all the "audiophile" suites and use Audirvana the most when I am at my computer at home (with iTunes integration). When interacting with my main system, I usually use Media Centre and at work I use Decibel (simple, fast and functional).

Each solution permits FLAC but no seamless FLAC integration with iTunes. The seamless adjective is important. All the solutions above offer work-arounds (or in some cases just better software outright) but iTunes is a slick piece on a Mac. It really is tough to beat if one's music is ALAC or AIFF.

Transcoding seems like the best option frankly. ALAC and AIFF can be played on almost any system using a wide variety of players. Using XLD to convert FLAC to ALAC or AIFF and delete the FLACS in the process makes the entire endeavor very painless. XLD also offers the ability to add music to iTunes after each file is parsed.