FLAC play back

April 20, 2008 2:00 AM

Playback of FLAC on Windows in 2008?

I'm not on Windows. My friend is. Requesting recommendations for a good player on Windows that supports FLAC please. Not really wanting to mess around with plugins, it should support it in the main application.

In keeping with the 'F' in FLAC I would prefer it to be Free Software (GPL license). I did a bit of a search and came across Songbird which sounds an interesting project, but still in development.

posted by Sitegeist to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

WinAMP plays FLAC.
posted by beerbajay at 2:23 AM on April 20, 2008

Although it's free as in beer, not speech, Foobar2000 plays lots of different audio formats, including FLAC. It's ridiculously versatile and has a surprisingly small memory footprint. Alternatively, VLC media player, is licensed under GPL and while it doesn't manage playlists and so on, it will handle pretty much any audio or video file you can throw at it, including FLAC.
posted by xchmp at 2:37 AM on April 20, 2008

Free as in beer, I can't recommend MediaMonkey highly enough if you have a huge, well-tagged library. It's not lightweight by any measure, but it handles FLAC out of the box, the development team are very active on the forums so while it's not free as in speech, the response time/openness to wishlists and bug fixing is pretty damn good...
posted by benzo8 at 3:29 AM on April 20, 2008

Seconding VLC. It's lightweight, loads fast and stays out of the way, and you can be certain it will handle any file type you throw at it.
posted by mattholomew at 4:32 AM on April 20, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I'll recommend VLC to her.
posted by Sitegeist at 1:56 AM on April 21, 2008