Here's the deal. I've been compressing audio for some time in MP3, and then recently in OGG. As much as I love OGG, from time to time I get the urge to bite the bullet and go for MPC, but, alas, changing formats AGAIN, after committing twice already, seems nuts -- esp. for such a small quality gain (OGG -> MPC as compared to MP3 -> OGG, which was a bigger deal).

Anyway, recently I bought a Mac with a DVD-R. Hmmm. You know what? With this kind of storage capacity at my command, why shouldn't I just compress all my audio LOSSLESSLY, and then burn it all to data DVD? That's, what, ~9-12 albums per DVD-R?... Screw compression -> $5 each for 4.7 GB discs is a great backup and computer playback mechanism. And with as big as HDs are getting nowadays, nothing would stop me from moving a bunch of DVD-R's worth of data to some future external 500 GB firewire drive.

Great. I know how great lossless audio works in Windows (and Linux). I've used Monkey's Audio in Windows, and FLAC in Windows and Linux, and both formats playback well in Winamp (and FLAC is good in XMMS too).

I have a DVD reader on my Windows machine, so playing back FLACs from DVD-R in Windows / Linux would be no issue. But I'd also like to play them back in OS X!...

I know that in OSX, I can fink for FLAC, or just download the source and compile it myself, to encode them, but what about playback? Is there any playback support for FLAC, APE, SHN, or whatever in OS X? What about Audion, or Unsanity Echo?...

Just wondering what any other Mac users might have to say about this...

I think for FLAC, a command line player was develped, based on another's code that shoul play FLAC's but im not 100% on this and definetly dont know wether it would play on a MAC.

I think i've heard about some windows emulators for MAC's that should work, also MANY modern Linux distros run and compile on mac architecture, so if u dont need and MAC specific programs, then bite the bullet and either run linux only or dual boot.

FYI, if you run linux, then WINE won't work for running Microsoft progs, as that is restricted to the X86 architectue!


Theres a few ideas anyway, sure someone else will have some better one's,,



Cheers,
Kristian


/EDIT

Im sure with OSX, you can run XMMS and compile the XMMS plugin!

If libao is ported to OS X, then there is a command-line FLAC player called flac123 in flac-tools. XMMS is in Fink also so you should be able to use that with the FLAC XMMS plugin (it works for me anyway).

Josh

Well, XMMS does play back FLACs in OSX. So at least there's something.

'Course, the idea of starting up an entire X environment, or using only a command-line app (compiling as I write this), to play back a collection of FLACs in OS X is unappealing at best. But it's a start.

(Tangentially, Ogg was enabled in Quicktime, and thus iTunes. Gosh, I wish I knew more about how Quicktime works...)

Apparently there is.



Yuck!



I love (and use) Linux, but that's not why I bought a Mac.



It's working as we speak. The only drawback is the necessity to start up AN ENTIRE WINDOWING SYSTEM just in order to use a simple player application.