If you grab at least the FLAC you can do any other conversions yourself later

I usually download the FLAC just because space is cheap but I would be fine with just 320kbps MP3, I can’t tell a difference between them and MP3 is basically universal.

...FLAC seems like the winner for your requirements, no?

I'd like to avoid having to convert it all the time (e.g. MacOS' music player doesn't seem to support that? But gonna have to check it). And the sizes are just enormous.

But yeah, as storage space & bandwidth are less and less an issue, if FLAC is fully supported across the board, the scale should be tipped. My worry comes from we not quite being there yet.

If you must support Apple Music there is ALAC. I’m not sure of any major use case that would support FLAC but not ALAC, ie consumer AVRs support both, but would be interested to know of counterexamples.

Music.app not supporting FLAC is kinda weird, because the rest of the OS has been able to handle it for a while now. Quicklook (spacebar preview), Quicktime Player, etc all handle it fine, but Music doesn’t despite using the same decoding and playback facilities.

I'm working on a desktop music player for Mac that does support flac. It should be ready for release early next year.

FLAC is great because it's future proof. You can transcode to other formats as needed but keep a lossless archive.

There are plenty of desktop music players on Mac that support flac, audacious, Cog, colibri, vox, Plexamp come to mind and there are others including commercial offerings. That is not the issue. People that wish to use the Apple official music ecosystem are SOL.

On the second point, ALAC works just as well as FLAC in that regard.

Yeah there are options already. Swinsian and Doppler are also pretty good. But I think there's still room for improvement.

While I am personally not happy with any of the offerings on MacOS, alternatives don’t help those interested in wanting to use Apple Music with any lossless archive other than ALAC.

> I'm working on a desktop music player for Mac that does support flac

There's already a whole bunch of them

Yes but I think there is room for improvement.

Audacious would be almost perfect if it supported ReplayGain for .m4a

I mean enormous compared to an MP3 I guess but I have 19,000 FLAC tracks that takes up less than 500GB, pretty cheap to store that in 2023.

...MacOS' music player doesn't support FLAC?

Sometimes I'm just baffled by how broken the Apple ecosystem can seem.

Broken on purpose in this case, I am sure, for the same reason Spotify doesn't deal with FLAC.

It supports ALAC.

There’s a handy app called XLD (X Lossless Decoder) that will convert from FLAC to ALAC (and probably back) in a couple clicks if you need it. Lossless means I don’t really need to care whether my music is in an equivalent format, but I will admit it’s a bit silly.

https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

ffmpeg -i audio.m4a -acodec flac

Your rudeness is entirely unnecessary and unworthy of this site. Not everyone knows the details of audio formats. That's OK.

OP – the reason they state this is that FLAC is lossless so offers limited compression but preserves input audio exactly. AAC is a lossy compression format and will discard input audio data that it thinks you don't need – converting it to other formats may produce artifacts. OGG is a container that supports both lossless and lossy internal formats, but I believe it's typically used with a lossy internal format (called Vorbis).

Not GP, but nothing about ML engineer demands knowing nuances of audio file formats for future proofing.

I just downloaded from Bandcamp for the first time. I've heard FLAC is sort of the go-to format for good quality, but when presented with ALAC, WAV, and AIFF which all had larger filesizes, I paused and asked a friend.

It just seemed to me like an odd question to ask into the public domain from someone who's in the technical sector. It's kinda basic that you'd want to take the smallest lossless file alone and perform all the other conversions either on demand or as needed. It's also - at least, to me - relatively 'polite' not to overwhelm a service which is apparently struggling by overloading the shit out of it with redundant downloads.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Personal attacks are particularly unwelcome and will get you banned here, so please don't do that.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Sorry, carried away etc.

The perfect solution is to take the FLAC version.

I know that I shouldn’t do this but I download the FLAC version and compress it to Opus 192kbps. It’s very high quality with the size of an MP3. I won’t be able to change the format and recompress it later, but I don’t really mind.