- #Music player for mac that plays flac for free
- #Music player for mac that plays flac download
- #Music player for mac that plays flac free
Why not just use iTunes? The iTunes Store only sells music in the compressed AAC format, and the iTunes player doesn’t support the most widely sold lossless format: FLAC.
#Music player for mac that plays flac free
The VLC player can be downloaded here.Īs an alternative to VLC, you might consider the VOX Music player, which is also free and can be downloaded here.
#Music player for mac that plays flac download
Once you have begun to build your hi-res audio library, how do you play the files in a way that maintains their high bit and sample rate? I chose to download the VLC media player to my Mac (it’s free) because it’s capable of 24/96 and 24/192 native hi-res output. (If anyone out there has made the switch, I’d love to hear about your experience in the Comments section.) I am strongly considering making the switch. I currently use Apple’s iCloud because I’ve been deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem from the first-generation iPod, but Amazon’s value proposition is compelling. Subscribe to Amazon Prime ($99 annually) and get 5 GB of storage for another $59.99 per year, you get unlimited storage. There isn’t anything preventing you from storing your music library there, but access is via Microsoft’s Groove Music Pass, which is $9.99 per month in addition to the $99 annual cost of MS Office 365.Īmazon’s Drive allows you to upload up to 250 songs for free. All your Excel spreadsheets, Word docs, and PowerPoint presentations are automatically stored there and are available for collaboration between users. When you purchase MS Office 365, you get 1 TB of storage. Microsoft looks at storage a bit differently, tying its One Drive storage to the MS Office suite.
#Music player for mac that plays flac for free
I had to leave some of my more esoteric albums off the iCloud drive to fit under the 2TB size limit.Īnother cloud option is Google Drive, which offers 15 GB for free or one terabyte for $9.99/month then it jumps to 10 TB for $99.99 monthly. Apple’s iCloud offers five gigabytes of free storage, which isn’t nearly enough for my music files, so I opted for the 2TB plan that costs $20 per month. My current total storage need is approximately 2.4 TB. Here are a few great-sounding albums (all available as hi-res downloads) that I’d put on my list of desert island discs:īob Marley: Legend (you are on a desert island, after all)Ībout a year ago, I grew concerned that my entire life’s savings of music–some of which is irreplaceable original music from the various bands I’ve been in–was all in one place, so I looked to the cloud for a backup/disaster recovery solution. If you’re looking for suggestions on high-quality audio recordings, check out the reviews on our sister site,. Primephonic, HiRes Download,, B&W’s Society of Sound, Acoustic Sounds, Chandos, and Blue Coast Records. Hi-res music files are available for download from a number of websites, including: , This was important when storage was expensive, but now storage is plentiful and cheap. To get the highest quality, you will want to avoid lossy formats like MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group Layer-3), AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), and OGG (Ogg Vorbis, the name Ogg derives from the jargon word ogging) that sacrifice audio quality for file size. DSD is the Philips/Sony system used to create the SACD (Super Audio Compact Disk) format, while MQA is a very clever codec that compresses the relatively little energy in the higher frequency bands to make the files smaller while retaining a hi-res result (it’s also a good format for streaming services). Hi-res files may be offered in the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) format, as well as DSD (Direct Stream Digital) and MQA (Master Quality Authenticated). We all know that your system is only as good as its weakest link, so I started with either 24/192 or 24/96 FLAC files. Opinions will vary on what constitutes hi-res audio, but I set my sights on resolutions equal to or better than 24-bit/96-kHz. Many people prefer to use an external drive because loading up your main hard drive with music files can potentially slow your computer’s overall performance, especially when you get to the end of your drive’s storage limits.
I store my music library on a 3TB Seagate external drive. The process starts with ripping or downloading music files directly to either your Mac’s internal hard drive or an external drive, or designating a cloud site for your file storage (more on this in a minute). I recently decided to set up my Mac in this way, to deliver hi-res throughout the signal chain–from my music library, to the player, to the DAC, to my preamp, amp, and loudspeakers (or preamp to headphones). If you own a Mac, you already have a high-resolution media file server at your disposal, with very little tweaking required to pass high-quality audio to your audio gear.
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