Apple and FLAC files

2025-08-06

it has been 3 years since i last owned an iPhone and a year since i last owned an iPad and yes, I am still fucking salty about the amount of hoops i had to do just to fucking import FLAC files to an iPhone… So if you want to use all your FLAC files on an iPhone, you would need:

• iTunes, becuase Apple stil doesn't allow you to actually access your files directly on your phone.
• Music player app that supports iTunes

You may think that sounds really easy, until you actually try finding a music player: 99% of all music players on iOS are fucking subscriptions or paid apps, and Apple Music, the default player, doesn't support FLACs.

I remember trying ten apps that claim to support FLAC playback, and then get hit with a “kys asshole pay up $15 dollars or die”, it was so bad that I just gave up and had to covert every single song from FLAC to shitty MP3 files, and now apple music was happy to read it.

How come every single platform in existance has support for FLAC files yet on the iPhone it is like “erm. yea. fuck you we won’t support this teehee”

Also someone is probably like “erm. lug. they have support for WAV files! or ALAC files! why not move your music to that?” WAV files suck for tagging reasons, they fucking love to just. forget what tags they had, so imagine you are there listening to your music and then the Dreaded Untagged Song shows up and now you have to go find that song on your PC (because iOS won’t allow you to edit the tags on your device), meanwhile ALAC files barely have support outside of Apple devices, also I couldn’t find any windows specific converting tools for ALAC, also didn’t felt the need to learn how FFMPEG works.

There is absolutely no reason they can’t add support to play FLAC files. The hardware is fully compatible to play them, macOS has had full support, but iOS and iPadOS are like “we can’t do that sorry”.