Recommendations for listening to FLACs on Mac? (not spam)

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

This is wildly off-topic, but does anyone have a recommendation for an application for listening to FLAC files on a Macintosh, specifically OS 10.7.2?

I used to use Play but it doesn’t seem to work since I updated to OS 10.7. A while ago Trumgottist recommended VLC to me for all-purpose sound playing, but I don’t like it; its metadata handling is incredibly awkward,* and worse yet, when I recently had to do a hard restart of my computer VLC barfed my whole library, so it looks like I’ll have to reimport every track I want to listen to.

So, is there anything else I should be using to play FLACs on OS 10.7? Especially something free. It would be a bonus if it played APEs, but FLAC support is really what I need.

*The problem: When you want to edit metadata, you have to mouse to the appropriate fields to type in the metadata, hit enter, mouse down to the “save metadata” button, and manually close the window. Which might not be so bad if VLC would let me edit the metadata for multiple files at once. Since I need my media player to keep the files from the same album together, and I don’t want to create a new playlist for every single album I want to listen to, it’s very important that I be able to change the artist/album info for a bunch of tracks at once.

[Erik_Temple]

I think that you can just install Perian and then listen to Flac files with just about any program that uses Quicktime, e.g. iTunes, Songbird, Cog, what have you.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

It looks to me as though it requires another plugin? From the Perian group:

@Alexander Strange

…this will do it:
people.xiph.org/~arek/flac_import/
Adding support for .flac to Perian should be possible, but I haven’t
been bothered to since that component exists.

I’ll try that download (not sure if I need Perian as well; the page it’s on might as well be in rot13).

[Erik_Temple]

Oops, guess so. But it looks like Songbird (Mozilla) and Cog both play FLACs natively, so you might have a look at those.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

@matt w

It looks to me as though it requires another plugin? From the Perian group:

@Alexander Strange

…this will do it:
people.xiph.org/~arek/flac_import/
Adding support for .flac to Perian should be possible, but I haven’t
been bothered to since that component exists.

I’ll try that download (not sure if I need Perian as well; the page it’s on might as well be in rot13).

UPDATE: OK, I downloaded that and in the readme file I find this:

• IMPORTANT *
  This component contains only MovieImporter for the native FLAC file
  format. It does not contain the original FLAC decoder part. To be of
  any use you will need to have a FLAC decoder component installed as
  well. Visit XiphQT project (xiph.org/quicktime/) and then
  install the lastest package available on:
  people.xiph.org/~arek/

So, uh, I need to install XiphQT and then get something from here – not exactly sure what, as 90% of the characters on that page are not in a natural language, and then install the download? I’ll try that, I guess, though I wish the developers were making more of an effort to be communicative.

UPDATE UPDATE: Well, maybe I’ll look at Songbird and Cog instead – it’s OK if I can’t run the FLACs in iTunes.

[Erik_Temple]

If you’re not yet on Lion, Fluke seems to set all the Xiph stuff up automatically.

code.google.com/p/flukeformac/

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

Songbird actually looks like it’s running great, thanks! Some odd things happened when it auto-imported my music folder, but some of that is probably due to my bad file handling (e.g., there seem to be two copies of anything I’ve already burned to a disc) and anyway fixing it will be less work than importing everything again by hand.