Since long time ago Winamp is able to play FLAC files without the need of any special plugin that is not included in its setup package. However, sometimes you may have faced this strange behavior, when Winamp refuses to play a flac album.

Winamp can read these tracks and display their tags, but it won’t play them. Press Alt+3 or right click to view File Information and you will see that these files are encoded in 24 bits 96 K and your soundcard or DAC can not produce this quality. Perhaps you ripped a SACD and you’ve got this encoding.

Try to convert these flac files into WAVs and they will remain useless – now Winamp will even popup a warning about the problem. You have to downgrade these flac files to 48K from 96 in order to use them in Winamp. Some other players, like VLC will do that on-the-fly upon playback (without changing the original), but not Winamp.

You can convert and resample these 96K FLAC files with XRecode or other audio converters. Check this post if you face problems with a WAV file.