Audiophiles please help me get ALAC files on my iphone

[mister j-y]

Hi everyone,

I've got a shed load of FLAC files that I'm coverting to ALAC and I want to get onto my iphone now that I've invested in a DAC/Headphone amp.

Aside from the fact that I'm using an iphone (TBH it's for convenience) has anyone had any luck getting ALAC files onto itunes and therefore an iphone? I'm having a nightmare - itunes doesn't recognise the files!

Can anyone give me some pointers please?

[J T]

Use a different app. For unfathomable reasons, i-tunes still doesn't play FLAC/ALAC.

[marurun]

iTunes and iOS devices all will play ALAC, but not FLAC. ALAC is just the open-sourced Apple Lossless Audio Codec.

The problem might be your encoding settings. iOS devices will not play ALAC files with a a frequency greater than 48 khz. So if your ALAC files are 24/96, you'll need to down-convert them to 24/48 or 16/44. I suggest 16/44 to save size.

And here's the obligatory: the difference between 16/44 and 24/96 has been rather uniformly demonstrated thus far to be impossible to distinguish with the human ear in blind listening tests.

[mister j-y]

Use a different app. For unfathomable reasons, i-tunes still doesn't play FLAC/ALAC.

Thanks JT - yeah I see there are a few that can play FLAC, but being lazy I don't want to have to do that if I can go around it! Having said that it may well have been easier just to do as you suggest

[mister j-y]

iTunes and iOS devices all will play ALAC, but not FLAC. ALAC is just the open-sourced Apple Lossless Audio Codec.

The problem might be your encoding settings. iOS devices will not play ALAC files with a a frequency greater than 48 khz. So if your ALAC files are 24/96, you'll need to down-convert them to 24/48 or 16/44. I suggest 16/44 to save size.

And here's the obligatory: the difference between 16/44 and 24/96 has been rather uniformly demonstrated thus far to be impossible to distinguish with the human ear in blind listening tests.

Thanks - I use Free Audio Converter and have tried to change the frequency previously with it but no good so far - however I will give this a proper go using your advice - fingers crossed!

***EDIT***
Not worked so far, I suspect I did something wrong - I converted to ALAC with 44100 Hz and 160 K/bits and still not recognised in itunes - are there any settings I need to have in itunes?

[marurun]

Will the files play in iTunes and just not on the iPhone? If they work on iTunes and are 16bit/44khz, they should also work on the iPhone. Also, make sure they are also stereo or mono and not multichannel. Apparently that gives the iPhone headaches.

Another option is to use the VLC app for iPhone and load your FLAC files into VLC and just exclude them from the regular Music app altogether.

[mister j-y]

Will the files play in iTunes and just not on the iPhone? If they work on iTunes and are 16bit/44khz, they should also work on the iPhone. Also, make sure they are also stereo or mono and not multichannel. Apparently that gives the iPhone headaches.

No they don't even register on itunes. I made sure it was in stereo too. What I've done now is buy a FLAC player app and that works great (and sounds incredible) but it's a bit annoying having to switch between different apps for non-FLAC music! Thanks again BTW

[J T]

No they don't even register on itunes. I made sure it was in stereo too. What I've done now is buy a FLAC player app and that works great (and sounds incredible) but it's a bit annoying having to switch between different apps for non-FLAC music! Thanks again BTW

I love i-Tunes for organization, so my music is primarily run through that. I use FLAC squisher to convert my FLACs to MP3 so that they can be played in i-Tunes and I can have all my music in one place, but if I really like the album, I'll keep a copy in FLAC so I can listen to it in VLC media player at high quality. I know that when I want to listen to music though, I open i-Tunes, so everything is in there. I just wish it could play more file types. I also wish they would bring back the old album cover flow visual, but that got updated out a couple years ago.

[mister j-y]

I love i-Tunes for organization, so my music is primarily run through that. I use FLAC squisher to convert my FLACs to MP3 so that they can be played in i-Tunes and I can have all my music in one place, but if I really like the album, I'll keep a copy in FLAC so I can listen to it in VLC media player at high quality. I know that when I want to listen to music though, I open i-Tunes, so everything is in there. I just wish it could play more file types. I also wish they would bring back the old album cover flow visual, but that got updated out a couple years ago.

Yeah, I know it's a minor thing but when they stopped us being able to control the size of the albums in the library in itunes I was a lot more pissed off about it than I ever thought I would be about something so inconsequential! The FLAC player I like so far is the (costs money) Dan Leehr app which automatically sorts everything into albums and it's easy to drop the covers in too (although still no coverflow). Also it has a configurable equalizer which is nicer than the bloomin presets

[marurun]

What convertor did you use to take your files from FLAC to ALAC? Maybe a different convertor would do the trick. Since ALAC is now open sourced, maybe some convertors add extensions to the format that Apple doesn't or can't read.

Edit: Actually, iTunes can convert files to ALAC. There are a couple ways to do that. You can get a FLAC plugin for iTunes and convert from FLAC to ALAC, or you can convert your FLAC files to WAV or AIFF files, and then import those into iTunes and convert those files to ALAC.

The safer, but slower, method might be the latter. Convert your FLAC files using something like Audacity or some free conversion program to 16/44 uncompressed AIFF or WAV files. Import those files into iTunes and use Apple's built-in ALAC/Apple Lossless encoder to encode them. Extra steps and more disk space required, but ultimately you know you'll get something that'll work on your phone AND in iTunes.

*nother edit*
According to this Apple support page you can convert and import at the same time, so you don't have to import the WAV or AIFF files into iTunes separately before conversion.