How to open .FLAC files (lossless audio) on Android, Windows and Linux

You bought an album online and picked the “lossless” download, or a friend copied over a folder of ripped CDs. Every song is a .flac file several times bigger than an MP3, and your usual music app won’t play them.

FLAC is ordinary music stored without any loss of quality. Folders, a free file manager for Android, Windows and Linux, opens a .flac file in its own audio player with one tap, offline and with no account.

What is a .flac file?

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. It was created by Josh Coalson in the early 2000s and is now looked after by the Xiph.Org Foundation, the non-profit group behind Ogg and Opus. It’s open and free of royalties, so most players support it.

“Lossless” is the key word. FLAC squeezes audio the way a ZIP file squeezes a document: the file gets smaller, but when you play it back, every sample is exactly the same as the original recording. MP3 and AAC are lossy: they throw away detail the ear is less likely to notice.

Here’s roughly what that means for one four-minute song at CD quality:

Format	Quality	Typical size
WAV	Uncompressed, perfect copy	about 40 MB
FLAC	Compressed, perfect copy	about 20 to 30 MB
MP3 at 320 kbps	Compressed, some detail lost	about 10 MB

You’ll usually meet FLAC in CD rips (made with tools like Exact Audio Copy or fre:ac), lossless or “hi-res” downloads from shops such as Bandcamp, and archives of live recordings. It can hold high-resolution audio, such as 24-bit at 96 or 192 kHz, and stores the title, artist and cover art inside the file.

How to open a .flac file with Folders

On Android

1. Download Folders from the download section and install it. Your phone may ask you to allow installs from your browser first.
2. Open Folders and allow access to your files when it asks.
3. Go to the folder with your music (often Music or Download). To find every FLAC at once, type .flac in the search box: Folders looks in that folder and all the folders inside it.
4. Tap a song. It starts playing in Folders’ audio player.
5. If the file is in an email or chat, choose Open with → Folders in that app.

To listen to a whole collection, open the side menu, then Toolbox → Music player. It gathers all the audio on your device into one queue.

On Windows and Linux

1. Install Folders: the setup program or MSIX on Windows 10 and 11; a deb, rpm, AppImage, Flatpak, Snap or tar.gz package on Linux.
2. Browse to your music in Folders and double-click a .flac file.
3. On Windows, you can also right-click the file in File Explorer and choose Open with → Folders. The installer adds Folders to that menu for the types it opens.

What you can do with it in Folders

• Play and pause, jump back or forward 10 seconds, and drag the seek bar to any point in the track.
• Share, rename or move files from the file browser, for example to tidy a rip full of “Track01.flac” names.
• Compress to ZIP to send an album as one file. It won’t get much smaller, though: FLAC is already compressed.

Folders is a simple player: no tag editing, no equaliser and no converting. For a big library with album art and playlists, a dedicated music app is the better home.

Other ways to open .flac files

• VLC: free on Android, Windows and Linux, and plays FLAC without fuss.
• foobar2000: a popular free player on Windows (with an Android version), good at tags and conversion.
• Windows’ own Media Player app plays FLAC on Windows 10 and 11.
• Linux music players such as Rhythmbox or Strawberry play FLAC out of the box on most distributions.

Problems opening a .flac file?

The whole album is one long file, with a .cue file beside it. Some rips are a single FLAC plus a CUE sheet, a small text file saying where each track starts. Folders plays the big file from start to finish and opens the .cue as text. To jump between tracks or split the file, use foobar2000.

Your car stereo or old MP3 player refuses it. Many older devices don’t support FLAC, or only up to 16-bit, 48 kHz audio. Make an MP3 copy for that device and keep the FLAC as your master.

The file won’t play or is far too small. A FLAC of a few kilobytes, or one that stops after a few seconds, is usually an unfinished download. Download it again.

It’s FLAC, but it doesn’t sound better. A FLAC made from an MP3 is only as good as that MP3. A free spectrum viewer such as Spek shows the telltale cut-off in the high frequencies.

Questions people ask

Can I play FLAC files on Android? Yes. Android supports FLAC, and Folders plays it in its audio player: tap the file, or use Open with → Folders from another app.

Is FLAC better than MP3? FLAC keeps every detail, so it’s better for archiving and good headphones. Whether you hear a difference from a high-quality MP3 depends on your ears and equipment; MP3 wins on space.

How do I convert FLAC to MP3? Folders doesn’t convert audio. Use fre:ac (free, Windows and Linux), foobar2000, Audacity, or the command-line tool ffmpeg, for example ffmpeg -i song.flac -b:a 320k song.mp3.

Are FLAC files safe? A real .flac only holds sound. Be wary of a “song.flac.exe”: that’s a program pretending to be music.

More audio guides: how to open WAV files and how to open OGG and Opus files. Or see all 382 file types Folders opens.