14 Apr 2007

FLAC and Ogg/Vorbis in iTunes

Posted by Jacob Emcken

After buying my Squeezebox I wanted to rip all my music to a lossless music format to get maximum quality out of the little thing. And the Open Source lover that I am the choice fell on FLAC. One problem though…

The problem is that my girlfriend is using Windows with iTunes which isn’t compatible with FLAC or Ogg for that matter.

I googled around for FLAC/Ogg Vorbis support for iTunes and found xiph.org which has a FLAC/Ogg Vorbis plugin for QuickTime ( and therefor also iTunes). iTunes uses the QuickTimes components to playback different audio and video types.

To bad that their latest version 0.1.7 is released only for Mac. It seems that you need to have FLAC contained in Ogg containers to be able to playback FLAC.

This link: a blog about Xiphs development deserves attention as well.

Category: Windows

1 Comment to FLAC and Ogg/Vorbis in iTunes

Kim Tholstorf
April 15, 2007

The XiphQT still does not support native FLAC file format. It’s listed as a known limitation in their release notes. For now only Ogg FLAC are supported. And this means that for now only compressed FLAC data encapsulated in an Ogg transport layer (ogg container file) is the closest thing that your girlfriend can get to the high-def FLAC experience… But you can put your money on (and in some way you already did with that Squeezebox) that in a short while the native FLAC file format will be supported by XiphQT :-) The framework is basically already in the code…

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