How to play music in FLAC format on iPhone and iPad

All judges of the right computer audio are probably familiar with lossless-audio. This concept holds several different data compression algorithms to ensure nearly complete identity with the original. This approach provides a high-quality sound, but will require much more disk space for storing your music catalog, as the resulting files in several times larger than the usual MP3 or AAC. The most popular format is a lossless FLAC, ALAC. They differ by exactly one thing: ALAC — a FLAC format, designed for Apple devices. When listening lossless-audio on Android devices is a simple task, you only need to upload files to the gadget, then the owners of gadgets running iOS will have to suffer a little more. Here are a few ways to listen to lossless files on the iPhone and iPad.

Use Flac Player +

Flac Player + — is an application for iOS, which, in contrast to the standard player, allows you to listen to files in FLAC. After installation you need to open the application and download music. You can do this in two ways: by connecting the device to your computer and download music from iTunes or via Wi-Fi. We have a detailed look at both.

The first method (via iTunes):

1. Connect the iPhone or iPad to your computer
2. Open iTunes, click on the icon of the connected device, and go to the tab «Applications».
3. Here you need to scroll to the bottom and choose Flac Player +.
4. Click «Add» button below and select the music you want to download to your device.

The second method (as Wi-Fi):

1. Open Flac Player + and select «Wi-Fi Transfer».
2. You will be shown IP-address and port. They need to be entered in the browser of your computer.
3. After you enter the IP-address and port in the browser, open a new page with the help of which you can download songs from your PC via Wi-Fi.

Transferring songs on Wi-Fi is a simple, but a long process. Due to the size of the files downloaded they are several times longer than wire.

Convert FLAC to ALAC

If you do not want to use third-party applications and prefer listening to music in the standard application «Music» you will have to convert FLAC to ALAC, because iOS devices do not support the standard lossless format. To do this:

1. Download fre: ac — free program that allows you to convert FLAC to format WAV, which we will use as an intermediate.
2. Open the fre: ac and add FLAC tracks to the desired program.
3. Start the conversion by clicking on the button with the green triangle. Get the files you want to download in iTunes. To do this, open iTunes and click «File» — «Add to Library».
4. Now select all tracks, click on the right mouse button and select the «Create a formatted version of Apple lossless».
5. When finished, you can delete WAV files.

The easiest way is to find the right music in the ALAC format. Advantages of this method are obvious: it is the most simple and does not require the user to any additional actions. However, there are significant drawbacks. As the popularity of the format ALAC is not too big, then you are interested in a composition, you often will not be able to find. In this case, you can use the solutions, which we spoke above!