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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

I wish apple supported FLAC. There’s an amazing free tool to convert to/from ALAC (https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html), but still: some players only support FLAC and some ALAC and sometimes you can’t transfer songs in either format because of the no overlap between source/target.

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I'm always mystified when someone says they wish their general purpose computing device running a Unix based OS supported X feature.

How can an Apple device not support FLAC? Are they really that locked down that you can't do something basic like install a codec?

> How can an Apple device not support FLAC? Are they really that locked down that you can't do something basic like install a codec?

You can't install a codec globally on iOS, but there are many, many player apps that support FLAC: https://www.igeeksblog.com/best-music-player-apps-for-iphone...

For folks who think Apple Music is the best music app for iOS, it's not difficult to convert songs, albums, or whole music libraries to ALAC.

I've been happy with Flacbox. Obviously it supports FLAC but it also supports OPUS which is great for the portability/sound quality tradeoff.

ALAC (Apple Lossless …) is not much newer than FLAC — it started in mid 2004 as the audio transport to AirPlay (previously called AirTunes) to AirPort Express.

I think they prefer it because it's in a MPEG4 container, it can be DRM encumbered with their "FairPlay" technology that they hadn't used for a while, but now use again for subscription Apple Music.

Even with Apple's Lossless format, it doesn't matter much because most people are listening through Bluetooth, which does not support lossless transmission.

iOS does support FLAC, it’s just the Music app doesn’t. It works in Files and Safari.

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