Flac players

Nothing wrong with Winamp. You have all those effect plugins to choose from.

Garlic said:

For me personally, foobar2000 works great with .flac files.

This is also probably THE best audio player of all time!

ignatzatsonic said:

asser said:

Hello,I was wondering what free media player is the best FLAC player,i mean witch player provides the finest audio.Kind Regards Asser

I doubt if you can tell the difference between them concerning "finest audio", by which I assume you mean sound quality.

The sound quality is determined by your listening hardware more than anything else--speakers, headphones, amplifier, etc.

Choose the one that has the features you need, that you understand, and that has a user interface you like.

I agree completely with ignatzatsonic's assessment above.
Here are screen shots of my setups of MediaMonkey and Foobar2000. Both can be customized to how you like. In my case, I use Mediamonkey for my lossy files (mp3, m4a, ogg vorbis and wma) and foobar for the FLACs.

I use The KMPlayer for all media files as it supports a whole range of different file types. It also works for .flac files so you might want to give it a try.
KMPlayer - Download

The media player however doesn't influence the sound or video quality. What does matter is the actual file you are listening as well as the external audio device you are using to listen to it eg. speakers, headphones.

its posible to have wmp play flac and for win 7 to show the flac albumart

Chappy said:

Hi SHUTRcz, Welcome to the Forum!

You need CODECS that allow WMP to recognize the FLAC files since FLAC is not natively supported by WMP.
The lightest and best codec pack is Win7 Codecs. Also if you have 64bit Win7, there is a 64bit tools pack you need to be able to switch to the 32bit WMP so all files will work. Codec writers have been slow to develop 64bit codecs so we need to use the 32bit player that also comes with 64bit Windows.

Anyway, install the Codecs and the x64 tools if needed, only the codec pack if you have 32bit W7. If you have 64bit W7, after you install the tools go to Start - All Programs - Win7 Codecs - 64bit tools - default media player, and click the "set 32bit WMP as default" and then the "set 32bit registry item" to make 32bit WMP the default player. There is NO performance difference between the two players but 64bit is NOT supported by many codecs.

For Flac tag support, get WmpTagExtender and install it. Make sure it's enabled in WMP, go to Options in WMP, plug-in tab, click Background and it should show in there with a checkmark, check it if it's unchecked.

Now you need to re-scan your library so Flac will show, WMP should do this automatically but make sure.

Hope this helps.