GOOGLE MUSIC AND SPOTIFY

Good news: Google Music accepts FLAC files, as long as your rips are broken up into tracks rather than in one enormous file. Bad news: They’re converted to MP3 as soon as they get there, and your source FLACs aren’t stored. It’s not the worst thing in the world, as Google does keep perfectly listenable 320Kb/s copies of your originals as long as the resultant file is smaller than 300MB, but it’s not suitable for backup if you’re concerned about staying lossless.

Spotify, which streams Ogg Vorbis files, doesn’t play nice with FLAC. You need to double up and convert your FLAC files to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis using a tool such as FlacSquisher ( http://sourceforge.net/ projects/flacsquisher) to add them to your library locally, and the service is yet to make good supplying its teased hi-fi streaming tier to all but a few select testers. When it does, we expect local FLAC support to roll in, too, but there’s nothing confirmed as yet.