HomePod Will Support Lossless FLAC Audio Playback

Peter Cao, writing for 9to5Mac:

HomePod specs are indicating that Apple is serious about the audio quality on the device. Today, we’ve discovered that the smart speaker will support FLAC out of the box.

For those unaware, FLAC is a lossless format, meaning there is no compression whatsoever and recordings are kept as is. Not to be confused with lossy, which is used by most music streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music and is usually compressed to 256 or 320Kbps.

How would this work, since the HomePod supposedly will not have access to music in our iTunes Libraries, which wasn’t purchased via the iTunes Store? Siri seems to be out of the question.

[…] AirPlay 2 will be able to transmit lossless audio to the Apple-branded smart speaker.

Can we store FLAC on our iOS devices in Apple Music on iOS 11.3? Or do we need to stream from a Mac, which means we would have to control playback from there?