Free flac software for mac

FLAC2Mac 0.2 is known as an easy to use solution for converting FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) to Mac-compatible audio formats like Apple Lossless or AAC that can be played in iTunes and transferred to an iPod or iPhone.

FLAC files contain true CD-quality audio and when using the Apple Lossless format, FLAC2Mac continues to maintain the same quality as the original CD. FLAC2Mac is an initial alpha release and as such, may contain many bugs.

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 Intel

Spotlight importers expose metadata in files to Spotlight, allowing easy, powerful desktop searching of your computers contents.

FLACImporter is a Spotlight importer for FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files, allowing Spotlight searches on the files metadata such as title, album, artist and genre.

Located here is a basic decoder for Apple Lossless Audio Codec files (ALAC). ALAC is a proprietary lossless audio compression scheme. Apple never released any documents on the format.
What I provide here is a C implementation of a decoder, written from reverse engineering the file format. It turns out that most of the algorithms in the codec are fairly well known. ALAC uses an adaptive FIR prediction algorithm and stores the error values using a modified rice or golumb algorithm. Further details are in alac.c.

Although an encoder is not provided, by using the decoder as a sort of specification it should be fairly trivial to write an encoder. By exploiting other lossless audio encoders, such as FLAC, the task will be much easier. Although one wouldnt be able to copy the compression algorithms verbatim, as adaptive compression is used in ALAC and not in FLAC. There are, however, a bunch of academic papers on the issue.

The program located here will not be able to handle all ALAC files, it can only handle mono or stereo files. ALAC allows up to 8 channels. It should be trivial to finish the implementation once I find files that I can test it with. Likewise the decoder only supports 16bit sample sizes. Again, it should be trivial to fix.

The decoder is fairly self explanatory, it can read an ALAC stream from either a file or from stdin, and write it as raw PCM data or as a WAV file to either stdout or a file. In theory one should be able to stream data to the decoder.

Play is an application for playing and managing audio files.
Play currently supports playback of FLAC, Ogg (Vorbis), Ogg (FLAC), Musepack, WavPack, Monkeys Audio, AAC, Apple Lossless, MP3 and various other audio file formats.

Play is integrated with the official Last.fm client, so you can share your listening habits with everyone. Consider joining the Play Users group!

Play is freeware, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).