Lacquer: Hi-Res FLAC Verifier

A lot of the "hi-res" music out there isn't. A file can say 24-bit/96kHz on the label and still be an MP3 that somebody re-encoded into a FLAC container and sold on. Your player shows the badge and has no idea.

Lacquer does. It reads the audio itself — not the file name, not the metadata tags — and tells you what is actually inside.

QUALITY CHECK

Every lossless file you import is decoded and analysed on your phone, with an FFT running on Apple's Accelerate framework. Nothing is uploaded. There is no account.

The verdict does not come from a single cut-off number. Three things are weighed: how steeply the top end falls away, whether that fall makes sense for the sample rate the file claims, and whether the same edge sits in the same place across different parts of the track. Real recordings fade out, and they wander. An encoder's cut does not.

It was tuned on real music rather than test tones. An early version that judged on cut-off alone accused genuine live recordings of being fakes, which is worse than useless, so it was rebuilt around those three signals instead.

It is also careful about what it says. A flagged file reads "may be upscaled", never "fake" — an old master or a quiet orchestral recording can look suspicious for perfectly honest reasons. When a file's top end simply ends too low for the evidence to point either way, Lacquer says it cannot tell, rather than guessing. Every verdict shows the number it was based on and the line that number was measured against, so you can look at the evidence and disagree.

Quality Check is free for everyone. It is not part of the subscription.

SEE THE EVIDENCE

Tap the artwork while a track is playing and it turns over. On the back is the file — format, bit depth, sample rate, size — and under it the device you are actually listening on and the rate coming out of it.

A file that failed the check does not get to show off the specs it claims. The label switches to the evidence instead: the claim struck through, where the sound really stops, how wide the roll-off is, and the threshold that decided it.

The spectrum analyser can be switched from the usual 16kHz ceiling to the full range the file carries. That band matters here — a lossy encoder's cut usually lands between 16 and 20kHz, which is exactly where an analyser that stops at 16kHz cannot look.

WHAT REACHES YOUR DAC

A signal path sheet shows file, engine and output side by side and says plainly whether anything is being resampled on the way through. Switch on "match the file's rate" and Lacquer asks the output to run at the file's own sample rate, and takes the equalizer and speed controls out of the path entirely.

iOS will not tell an app which rates a connected DAC accepts, so Lacquer finds out the only way there is: it asks for each rate in turn and reads back what the hardware actually did. The answer is remembered for that device.

THE REST OF THE PLAYER

Lacquer plays FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC and m4a from your own library, gapless, with crossfade and a 10-band equalizer.

Bring music in from the Files app, from your DRM-free iTunes tracks, or straight off your own server — Lacquer has native SMB and WebDAV clients for the NAS boxes that never appear properly in Files. There is an Apple Watch companion for playback control.

Everything stays on the device. It works on a plane.

LACQUER PRO

Unlocks the equalizer, unlimited imports, cloud import and an ad-free app. Weekly, yearly, or a one-time lifetime purchase. The free version shows ads and includes Quality Check in full.

Lacquer never plays DRM-protected tracks and never bypasses any protection. It is a player for music you already own.

Privacy Policy: https://lacquer.siamclaw.com/privacy-policy.html
Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/