Cool! I’m sure this is common knowledge by now, but I’ve only just got OSX so to me this is super cool. On windows, I always wanted to be able to natively play .FLAC files within iTunes, but there was no real way of doing it, and I had to rip my CDs in proprietary Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format instead.
On the mac, some legend has written a nice package called Fluke that allows you to easily get your flacs into iTunes. Game on!
EDIT: This software renders iTunes fairly unstable at editing flac files: I gave up trying to edit a bunch of Beatles .FLAC rips after it crashed about 5 times within 10 minutes. I recommend converting the FLACs to .WAVs in Max, and then imprting these (still lossless) files into iTunes and then converting them to Apple Lossless format to reduce the huge filesize somewhat.
Also, this fix allows iTunes to play .FLACs but it should be noted that it (obviously) doesn’t enable .FLAC usage on the iPod, which is something that didn’t immediately occur to me.
Note 1: You can’t add your own artwork unless..
Note 2: You just use iTunes store to get artwork (right click -> get album artwork)
Note 3: The coders got the .flac format past the vigilantly proprietary eye of iTunes by writing the codec for Quicktime and smuggling it in as a movie format with no video, I think.
Ian