Any way to listen on an Ipod?

[pinkmonte]

Is there any way to listen to these on an Ipod? Or is the only way make a copy and convert them to MP3?

[jasonritter7]

Is there any way to listen to these on an Ipod? Or is the only way make a copy and convert them to MP3?

It depends on the ipod. Newer apple ipods can play alac files, which is just apples version of flac. (If youre unsure if yours can, look it up.) I believe there is a way to convert flac to alac on itunes.
ALAC still takes up just as much space as FLAC files, so if you have 16gb or under, you'll only be able to have a few shows on your ipod. I guess you could convert
files to mp3 if youre hard pressed for storage, but it seems pretty frowned upon in the trading community. This is because people don't want mp3 versions of
shows circulating when they were made to be and were originally flac.

It's honestly pretty easy and "cheap" to get a music player that can just play flac and has expandable storage. I have an APGTEK a02 that I keep my shows on,
and it plays flac files just fine. It literally only cost my about $40 for the player and sd card, and I got 72 gigs of flac storage.
Compare that to an apple ipod nano, which is $100 and has a non expandable 16gb. thats just my advice tho

Cheers, Jason

[Phred68]

It depends on the ipod. Newer apple ipods can play alac files, which is just apples version of flac. (If youre unsure if yours can, look it up.) I believe there is a way to convert flac to alac on itunes.
ALAC still takes up just as much space as FLAC files, so if you have 16gb or under, you'll only be able to have a few shows on your ipod. I guess you could convert
files to mp3 if youre hard pressed for storage, but it seems pretty frowned upon in the trading community. This is because people don't want mp3 versions of
shows circulating when they were made to be and were originally flac.

It's honestly pretty easy and "cheap" to get a music player that can just play flac and has expandable storage. I have an APGTEK a02 that I keep my shows on,
and it plays flac files just fine. It literally only cost my about $40 for the player and sd card, and I got 72 gigs of flac storage.
Compare that to an apple ipod nano, which is $100 and has a non expandable 16gb. thats just my advice tho

Cheers, Jason

Great advice from jasonritter7 ... for me, it's a Sandisk Clip Zip (with Rockbox firmware - a must). Plays flac great! And with an extra SD card ... perfect! Just find a player you like and make sure in the specs that it plays lossless files. There are lots of free converters (Audacity, foobar) out there too, or if you have to use iTunes, it will most likely convert to ALAC. But like Jason said - if you have to reduce to mp3 or m4a or aac, whatever, convert to a COPY only!

[pinkmonte]

Thanks for the advise guys....I would never change the original files to MP3....I would make a second copy and convert those, if need be. I''ll look into the players and see if my ipod will convert. Everything I've have I've kept in the original format...stream them through the computer to my stereo....but I would like to hear some on the go too.

[zososhane69]

Newer generation ipods play AIFF files too which I prefer. AIFF takes up a little more space than ALAC.

[snagu]

Newer generation ipods play AIFF files too which I prefer. AIFF takes up a little more space than ALAC.

Possibly up to twice to space because AIFF is an uncompressed format. (I gather there is also compressed version of AIFF called AIFF-C but have seen nothing that indicates (a) any lossless compression formats are included in AIFF-C and (b) that iPods can play AIFF can also play AIFF-C.)

[oldpink]

As the others mentioned, the newer iPods can play the formats mentioned, but there's a third option, which is to Rockbox your iPod.
This software is usable on all iPods through the 5.5 generation and the Nano first generation.
It natively supports FLAC, and I have used it on my 5 generation (aka iPod Video) before, although I eventually put the original iPod firmware back on it because my ears lack the acuity to discern between FLAC and the 128Kbps rate at which I encode all my MP3 files, at least on my car stereo, which is nearly always how I listen to my iPod.
Yes, I have an iPod well over ten years old now that I'm still using on a regular basis.
http://www.rockbox.org/

[DesAntione]

This might not be an appropriate suggestion for an iPod owner but I can play FLAC files on my old iPhone 4s using an app called NPlayer and KODI/XBMC. The old smartphone is one of those "glorified media devices" now. I can even stream my files off a NAS, with some hiccups. KODI/XMBC is a better option IMO, but requires a jailbreak. NPlayer and KODI are more of an all in one media app more suitable for video, they were the only apps that could play mp3, FLAC, wav, wma, aac, etc listed in a m3u playlist; I create m3u playlists using Foobar2000 which points to the files hosted on the NAS, m3u's are stored locally on the device. This requires the playlists to be manually updated if music is added or changed. Sounds complicated, but it's easy once you understand the basics. KODI has some issues with large libraries, but if playing files locally stored on your device the app works great. NPlayer works well too, however there will be a few second gap between tracks because of the way the app handles files. KODI has seamless track progression. 30,000 tracks in my "All music" m3u, nice feature to have if you set the playlist up correctly. NPlayer did have an update which broke some nice playlist features, so I would recommend KODI/XBMC for now. This will require a jailbreak, however there may be alternatives in the app store, search for FLAC player.