How to play lossless audio on your iPhone or iPad (FLAC, etc.)

Since you're reading these lines, chances are you consider yourself an audiophile – you are passionate about music and you demand it to be reproduced at the best quality possible. If that's the case, then you surely know that achieving audiophile-grade audio quality is a tricky business. That's because audio fidelity is affected by many factors. With digital audio sources, in particular, one of them is the format of the file being played.

In general, digital audio formats can be split into two categories. AAC and MP3, for example, are of the so-called lossy formats – when a CD-quality track is encoded in either of them, some audio information is lost in the process. But the file produced is drastically smaller than the original. That's why most of the music distributed over the internet comes as either an AAC or an MP3 file. The so-called lossless formats, on the other hand, preserve all of the source's audio information. Size-wise, they occupy more storage space than their lossy counterparts, but they're still much smaller than an uncompressed CD-quality track. FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) belong to the group of lossless audio formats and are probably the most popular among them.

Can iPhones and iPads play lossless audio? Sure they can! There's a catch, however – iDevices are made to work with Apple's own ALAC audio format, while FLAC isn't supported out of the box. And that's not cool since a huge chunk of lossless audio distributed online comes in FLAC format. Fortunately, there are several ways to get around this limitation.

Method 1: Using Flac Player+

Flac Player+ is a free audio player which can play back the FLAC format. It is far from the prettiest audio player out there, but it gets the job done and comes free of charge. Ads are displayed in some screens within the app, but they're not too obtrusive. Here's how you get it to work: