FLAC support

It´d be great if the zune could play flac , I have tons of music in flac that i´d love to put in my zune, but in the mean time, does anybody know where can i find a converter to convert flac to mp3?

 shinkufan wrote:

It´d be great if the zune could play flac , I have tons of music in flac that i´d love to put in my zune, but in the mean time, does anybody know where can i find a converter to convert flac to mp3?

I use BonkEnc to convert my flac to VBR mp3. I haven't tried anything else since this one works perfectly well for me.

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bump for vote to include support.
doesn't make sense to limit the supported formats, especially open source types.

yeah i just realized that neither zune nor its player plays .ogg or .flac and i have a lot of albums that aren't being played. I guess i'm going to have to go back to using winamp. If creative hadn't messed up their zen vision M and W and had another newer version available i would have went with them, even for just this reason.

Frankly any mp3 player which panders to the audiophiles is going to do well. Everybody has that one friend who cares way more than most and whom most people will go to for suggestions.

 lsb337 wrote:

Frankly any mp3 player which panders to the audiophiles is going to do well. Everybody has that one friend who cares way more than most and whom most people will go to for suggestions.

On the other hand, Apple is doing really well with excellent marketing and branding, despite having probably the worst sound quality of all the PMP in the market :S
Blame the "sheep" for believing everything they see and hear...


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Back on topic: I wasn't surprised to find out there is no support for OGG and FLAC on the Zune.  That's just Microsoft being Microsoft, after all.  It would be great if we can get those file types to play.  I mean, if the developers actually went through the trouble to make the Zune compatible with Apple's proprietary formats, it should be comparatively easier to support the open source formats.

I'd like to add my support for Zune supporting flac. It's certainly the most popular lossless compression format.

 schwiz1 wrote:

its a free codec and superior to any other codec IMO please add it.

 

I absolutely agree, although I am pessimistic that it will happen.

I'd love to see FLAC and ogg support as well.

Since Zune is an extension of the Windows Media Center platform, it's probably using either exactly the same audio codecs or something very similar. If that's the case, then it should be trivial to add FLAC and ogg support (and everything else under the sun) to the Zune by allowing you to "install" third partie audio codecs.

While I'm on that point, you might as well allow third party video codecs as well.

I would understand, though, that Microsoft wants to have a unified and predictable platform to sell, which generally means third party stuff goes out the window because it usually just creates a support nightmare. That being the case, I would advise Microsoft to create a wrapper around these third party audio codec (heck, you could just key-sign them) and provide them on the Zune website for download. This would create a more plausible compromise between the need for third party codecs and the support problems.

As a final note, I'd like to point out that supporting more formats only strengthens the Zune as a platform. If I were a Zune dev, I'd want to look at a supported codec matrix and see my product light up everything (obviously AAC-DRM is probably not going to happen, though kudos for AAC support anyway). Honestly (and I don't know how the business people would take this) if you could buy a song on iTunes and play it on your Zune, you'd be far more competitive with Apple because its not just iPod v. Zune-- nobody wants to lose their entire collection of music to upgrade (and, yes, I consider it an upgrade to go to Zune) their mp3 player. Especially when you're heavily invested financially in it.

OK I am a novice so I don't understand most of what you people are talking about. So is there a way to play flac on zune? And if there is can I get a detailed tut. I really don't need any smart ass responses from people that are so knowledgble that they can't belive that someone actually don't understand. I welcome replys from paitient people who understand  some of us have no clue.

I don't see why the zune just can't support a drag + drop codec placement into say a "Codecs" folder inside the Zune.. Allow you to add any codec you want..

It sounds simple to me..

I would rather .wav over FLAC but.. having to put any codec you want into the zune would be freakin' fantastic.

It is that simple, but it's not. They can support it, but they intentionally don't (as far as I can tell, anyway). Essentially, Zune is a tiny Windows Media Player - they're built on the same platform. The obvious difference is that the Zune works using as little power and processor as possible. If Zune were to allow, say, an inefficient codec that hadn't been optimized for mobile applications like the Zune, your battery life would become abysmal. Unfortunately, most people wouldn't blame the codec and Microsoft's support centers would be flooded with calls saying "my Zune dies after 30 minutes of playback."

It's reasonable that Microsoft would want to take the codec in question (say FLAC, which is free open source) and optimize it for its platform, but that costs development resources and they need to know that people want it and it isn't going to be a useless feature. That's what we're here for, right here, right now. Keep asking. Persistence is key.

Count me in as one looking for FLAC support.  I really like my 30GB Zune, but the lack of FLAC support is one of the big items keeping me from ditching my 60GB iaudio.  There are means to upgrade the HD size so that's not a problem.  I have nearly a TB of FLACs in my library that I have no desire to convert lossless wma.