What's the simplest way to get .flac music files into iTunes?

I'm looking for a simple way to import .flac files into iTunes, so I can play them on my mac, and when I'm out, my iPhone, and I'm willing to be I'm not the first person to want to do this.

What are the best tools for doing this?

The quality of the music is useful, but truth be told, the speakers I'd play them on are so crappy that a lot of the sound quality in the .flac format would be lost anyway, so I'm not averse to converting to mp3 files.

If it helps give any context, I'm using a Macbook with OS 10.5 Leopard, and iTunes 9, connected to a 16gb iPhone with standard apple headphones, which is sometimes plugged into Bose SoundDock for music, and the music files are piano performances.

C

Solution 1:

You can convert the flac files to wav using the standard flac tools. iTunes will import wav files, and you can convert them to mp3 or AAC there.

Solution 2:

I am the developer of FLACTunes, which lets you import your FLAC files into iTunes as Apple Lossless files, preserving all the metadata (album art, etc.) It's four bucks on the OS X App Store. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, it is the simplest way to do what you're trying to do. The other solutions are more complex and won't preserve your metadata.

Solution 3:

Hmm..

I've stumbled across this the XLD lossless decoder here - it's worked fairly well, but I need to change a few preferences:

If you try a batch conversion,the importer only searches one hierarchy level deep, which often isn't enough, so you need to set the preference to 0 to keep running recursively in a directory.

It does have a handy import into iTunes feature though, which is a nice plus.