Broken FLAC support is a new Known Issue in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Windows 10 users should be aware that if they update to the Windows 10 October 2018 Update it may affect their ability to listen to uncompressed music.

Since its release in 2015 Windows 10 has touted native support for FLAC encoding, which offers full quality uncompressed music. The support has however never been as full as for MP3’s however, and in the October 2018 update appears pretty broken.

With the April 2018 update users were not able to rate music or edit meta-data and in the October 2018 Update Microsoft introduced a new bug which results in existing metadata being truncated, with long track names and other details being cut off, as can be seen in the screenshot above. The same track will show the full track name on an April 2018 PC.

Worse still, when arranged in a playlist, for some reason both Groove and Windows Media Player would skip the first minute of a track, and shorter tracks would not even play.

Microsoft appears aware of the issue, with Microsoft noting in a 19H1 build:

We fixed an issue resulting in FLAC metadata being cut short in File Explorer and other locations.

It is not however listed as a Known Issue for Windows 10 October 2018 Update, and Microsoft has clearly not backported the fix to existing installations.

There is an ongoing thread at Microsoft Answers here where users are lamenting the problem.

FLAC is of course not the most popular format in the world, particularly in these days of streaming, but as usual, introducing bugs to what should be a basic and stable feature does raise questions regarding quality. Hopefully, Microsoft will do the right thing and bring the fix to existing October 2018 Update users, especially if they are planning to start pushing out the update to regular Windows 10 users soon.

Thanks, MS for the tip.