I have a bunch of .flac files from several years ago and I noticed today, they don't play on my Windows 7 computer.

Presumably because I don't have the proper software installed to play them.

So what software should I download and install.

I googled and found a bunch and am leery to start installing stuff that I am unsure about.

VLC will play pretty much any file you throw at it.

Hugh, I ran into this with .ogg (Ogg Vorbis) files.

I used the Windows 7 (x64) built-in search mechanism and it gave me this:

http://www.finalmediaplayer.com/?src=fmp

It was the only choice provided. Free.

It works OK. However, it appears cumbersome for playlists, and plowing multiple files at it to play as a que. But it does seem stable.

I haven't really gone too deeply into this as I don't generally play music for listening on the PC. For those who do a lot of playlists, sorting, cataloging etc, I've heard Monkey's Audio player works well and supports a lot of codecs.

Cameron

+1 for VLC.

Also give foobar2000 a try. It's my audio player of choice. It has native support for many formats (flac, ogg, mp3, aac, etc.) and can support many others by downloading additional plugins. It may not be the prettiest audio player by default, but it's lightweight and doesn't use very many resources.

From the FLAC guide (http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_tasks.html)
Windows Media Player (WMP) - Sorry, Microsoft has made it impossible to rip to FLAC in WMP; hopefully this will change eventually.
I've got to think this is by design.

The FLAC codec can be downloaded here (http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html). Even with the codec and tools installed, WMP still refuses to play FLAC files. Every other media player I have used on Windows either plays FLAC files natively or by using the freely available codec.

am leery to start installing stuff that I am unsure about.If you decide to go with VLC for playing FLAC files make sure that it is the authentic, real, original VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) and not one of the new crop of plagiarized, wrapped-VLC malware packages with different names that are being put out by rip-off scam-spam-scum.

Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) is probably overkill but is terrific at working with FLAC files beyond just playing them.

I believe the correct site for VLC is Videolan.org (http://www.videolan.org/). Another good program for playing and, especially, organizing music files is MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/). MediaMonkey will also transcode FLAC files to another format. As I said before, just about any media player, except WMP, will play FLAC files.

Thanks guys,

Actually, when I was saying I was looking for software, I really meant the codec

I downloaded from

hxxp://downloads.sourceforge.net/flac/flac-1.2.1b.exe

but didn't want to install it without asking

All my .flac files play with Sonos so I never downloaded a codec for my main PC which i've had for 18 months and was surprised when I clicked on the file and it didn't play in WMP.

ffdshow supports Flac. So does CCCP. Both are safe to install and cover a wide range of audio and video codecs.

Thanks sleemo.

Since it will likely come in handy and I've certainly used it before, I decided to install VLC. On this computer, I will only need it occasionally. My music is played via Sonos now so I don't need play much music on my PC.