Do any players support flac on the Mac (OS 9? OS X?), besides MacAmp Lite?

Any effort being made to get flac support for iTunes?

FYI the MacAmp Lite folks are closing shop, the player can still be downloaded and they've posted the codes to unlock the software. Though the flac plugin link isn't working anymore, maybe it's posted somewhere on the web.

XMMS works on OS X. That's all that I know of.

Josh

the downloadable beta plays both flac and shorten natively.

i havn't actually used it to play back any flacs though.

macamp lite x plays shn and flac just fine even shortened aiffs with shorten 3.5.1.
unfortunately i haven't seen any mention that another company (panic, apple?)
have plans to support those files

Unsanity's Mint Audio Player supports 30+ formats, but unfortunately doesn't list them all on their site. May want to check with them. Wish Audion supported it.

videolan / vlc does it ... it's a less than elegant solution for audio (unless i'm not completely understanding the interface) ...

videolan

plays MP1, MP2, MP3, AC3, AAC, Vorbis, WMA 1/2, ADPCM, DV Audio, and last but not least, FLAC.

i just wish i could figure out how to get it to write files... =(

Interesting, though as you note given the interface not an ideal solution. But if you're just using it on a mac to test files, sample, etc. it might do fine, and is certainly better than not having the option.

I haven't used videolan as an audio player, but it's very useful for video files and S/VCDs. It's gotten pretty good at that over the last several months.

Also haven't tried to use it to write, but it seems worth a try at some point.

Any other players, anyone?

Can anyone verify that VLC for Mac OS X actually can play a FLAC file?

As a test, I installed Flac via Fink on my eMac. After I encoded a song with Flac, I was able to play the resulting .flac file with VLC. The only weird thing is that it doesn't give you a running time counter, although it seems fine otherwise.

I thought FLAC files sounded really bad out of VLC (if anyone has a clue why, please tell me). Same files sounded great out of MacAmp Lite X. Would really like something still under development though. Please, any other suggestions?

I second the xmms recommendation. It's easily downloadable with fink and run through x11. Be sure do download the flac plugin after installing xmms. You can get that with fink also.

http://www.xmms.org/

I don't own a Mac, but a quick google search led me to MacFLAC. Looks pretty good to me

MacFLAC (and FLACer and RipBeak) are front ends for the FLAC encoder on OSX. They aren't players.

VLC seems to interface with the audio layer of OS X in a weird way. I've had strange things happen with a variety of file types though that might be because I output the sound through an m-audio Sonica.

I too output my audio to a USB device (Xitel). Just tried it through the onboard audio "card" and sound was much better. There must be some VLC/USB issues. Too bad.

I didn't notice anything funny when I used VLC to listen to the Flac files I generated. This was on an eMac with the built in speakers.

What I think is needed is a Flac plugin for Quicktime. That would allow iTunes to play them as well. Sadly, I have discovered that I do not have the ability to program or I would do it myself.

There is an open source ogg quictime plug-in, which allows for ogg files to be played in iTunes. Hopefully someone will modify that so flac files can also be played on iTunes as well.

ss1.

Yeah, me too. It's times like these that I wish that I had an aptitude for programming (I've tried several times but I'm just not good at it) or a lot of money so that could hire someone to create the plug in.