Flac Files on a Mac

20 January 2008 253 views No Comment

Yesterday I found some .flac files on a hard drive I didn’t even know I still had. It seems that ages ago, when I was still a Windows user, I backed my audio cd’s up … and good that I did, because I lost one during a move and another one got scratched badly when I lent it to someone (since then, I don’t give away hard copies any more!).

Anyway, I thought I’d put those files in my iTunes library, but hey … my Mac didn’t like the file format. I couldn’t play the files and therefore I couldn’t import them into iTunes. So my goal was to convert the files into a format that iTunes liked.

Of course, now you will point out VLC player – and play the file it did! I tried to export them through the streaming wizard, but got only white noise. So, I could listen to them on my Mac, but I couldn’t put them on my iPod. Bad.

I tried ffmpegx and Audacity next … neither of them liked the files.

So, Google was my best buddy once again. It turned up a method by which you could import those files directly into iTunes, but to be honest – that was too difficult for me. I wanted a nice and easy, “do not think about it”-way.

In the end I stumbled across Switch, a neat little app that converts between different audio formats and also supports .flac files. Yihaaa! The software is free, but you can purchase a “Plus License” that will enable even more file formats. Since during the first 14 days of use these additional formats are enabled I don’t know if .flac is supported in the free version … I guess I will find out in 13 days.

UPDATE: Switch will NOT do the trick after the trial period has expired. Check this entry out for an alternative.