OS X alternatives to iTunes for playing FLAC

Question

I am new to OS X and their player iTunes doesn't seem to like FLAC (they support only ALAC). I am looking for a player to play FLACs.

I know VLC does the job, but is there any player that can:

1. Search media library
2. Manage playlists
3. Add favorites

I'm looking for something like Banshee in OS X.

Answer 1

There's Clementine, a cross-platform fork of Amarok 1.4. I'm not sure how well (if at all) it works with iTunes playlists, etc. but it does support FLAC and has (in my opinion) a great library management feature set.

Answer 2

Enqueue does everything you want and the nice thing is that you can assign any folder or folders to it and it will watch them.

Extensive File Format Support
Enqueue supports tagging and playback for many formats including mp3, mp4, aac, ogg, flac, wav, aiff, musepack and more.

I've only used the beta which wasn't completely stable, but it is out of beta now.

Answer 3

VLC media player is pretty good for flac; and also i think double-twist has flac support, but im not shure (personally, i prefer studio quality AAC). with VLC you cannot sync any devices (as far as i know), but the good thing about double-twist is... well, it has syncing support for both android devices and iPods (excluding iPod touch 3). also, double-twist has playlist and smart-playlist support, as well as favorites, a rating system, a music store, a genius-like feature, and so many other features that expand on the ones iTunes has.