Apple Lists FLAC Audio Playback Support for 4K Apple TV, iPhone 7, iPhone 8, iPhone X

Apple make it available on iTunes!!

You can play HD Audio over Bluetooth. And it sounds great.

HD FLAC files sound brilliant. I'm considering the Note 8 as it has 1-bit audio playback as well. Have a bunch of DSD audio files. Does it make a difference? Certainly a hell of a lot better than AAC or MP3.

I have these BT headphones for my S7 edge that playback 24bit 96khz audio over Bluetooth, so it can be done. Just needs a proprietary codec (Samsung UHD over Bluetooth) or Qualcomm AptX HD

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Alas, over Bluetooth, an iPhone, which doesn't have Apt-X compatibility, will re-compress anything that's not AAC to SBC, which sounds like absolute crap. For instance, Spotify - even in "Extreme" 320kbps Ogg Vorbis, sounds vastly inferior to Apple Music @256kbps AAC, because the iPhone sends raw AAC over bluetooth to compatible headphones, whilst it recompresses the OGG on Spotify into SBC.

The only solution I've found to use my Spotify subscription over Bluetooth in a decent quality is to use a cheap Android phone with Apt-X...

By the way, all those Bluetooth 5 bells and whistles will change nothing.

http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2016/09/assume-bluetooth-piped-aac-apple-makes-an-ass-out-of-you-and-me/
we must assume that Bluetooth audio is still sent from iPhone 7 to Airpods, or any other Bluetooth headphone, using AAC – Apple’s ‘own’ lossy codec of choice. In theory and reality this diminishes the listening experience when directly compared to an aptX-piped Bluetooth pairing.

iOS only uses AAC over Bluetooth for content that is already encoded in AAC: Apple Music and songs bought on iTunes. Any other codec (Spotify's OGG, Deezer or Amazon's MP3, Anghami's Dolby Pulse, Qobuz's ALAC, Tidal's MQA...) is re-compressed using the inferior SBC codec, which is more battery-efficient but more lossy. As a result, you get double the compression artifacts and the soundstage is reduced to nothing.

Lack of FLAC support has never been much of a big deal for me because both FLAC and ALAC are lossless and you can convert between them.

Any FLAC content I acquire gets transcoded to ALAC and I delete the FLAC files. Should I want FLAC in the future I can just transcode it back. That's what's great about lossless formats.

Just convert FLAC to ALAC, folks. It works natively on iTunes, plays back on hardware ranging all the way back to the first iPods, and the compression ratio is very similar. There's also plenty of free tools to do it, including ones that'll parallelize the conversion of many files to do it quickly on multi-core CPUs.

This is bizarre, are you serious?! Isn't there an optical out?

FLAC! But where are DTS, DTSHD, TrueHD, Atmos - for that matter where is bitstreamed anything on the Apple TV 4K? They support DD+ but won't even bitstream it, it has to be converted to LPCM. I was going to pre-order today, but changed my mind at the last minute due to the limited audio options.

I think more people care about HD audio formats for their movies than care about FLAC.

Crazy, isn't it?
I also wonder when Apple will bother to include higher than AAC formats into the HLS specification (apart from the antiquated AC3 pass-thru that's reserved for the Apple TV) - Apple's format for streaming over HTTP. It's a headache for streaming services who want to offer ALAC/FLAC streaming that HLS doesn't have any kind of lossless /HD audio support. They have to cobble together proprietary implementations loosely based on MPEG-DASH or even worse, HDS/RTMP (Flash!).
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http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2016/09/assume-bluetooth-piped-aac-apple-makes-an-ass-out-of-you-and-me/

AAC isn't as good even as AptX...

I know! But to me, Apple Music in AAC sent straight to my Bluetooth headphones on an iPhone sounds about the same as Spotify in OGG re-compressed to Apt-X and sent to my Bluetooth headphones on my Xperia XA.

The worst is, the iPhone doesn't even recompress Spotify's OGG into AAC, it uses the inferior and older SBC codec, which frankly stinks. It does the same with Tidal Hi-fi or Qobuz Hi-Fi.

I re-ripped all my music to Apple Lossless years ago but would have preferred FLAC as my understanding is that's it's an open standard compared to AL. So is this going to be an option in iTunes from here forward (rip in FLAC) or have I misread/misunderstood?

ALC is open-source as well, although it has less support in the open-source community.