
The Music app still has part of old iTunes functionality to fetch album art and songs metadata, which saves time. It also should be possible to rip Audio CD with the Music app directly into ALAC. It still can be a good investment in the long term because Audio CD from Amazon can cost less than digital versions.


The biggest barrier is buying an external USB drive. I am looking into purchasing an Audio CD again. Converting between lossless formats preserves full audio quality.Ī lot of the albums I have in my music collection were bought and ripped. XLD has a decent GUI and an updated Big Sur style icon. I tested it in Big Sur 11.4 and was able to convert a bunch of FLAC songs into Apple Lossless. Luckily there’s a free app to convert between FLAC and ALAC, called XLD. The Music app supports lossless playback, but it only supports ALAC, while most people rip their CD into FLAC. It rubs me the wrong way to continue buying music in iTunes knowing that Apple has better quality files and uses them as marketing leverage to win me over and start paying for Apple Music on a monthly basis. For those, me included, who prefer buying their music will have to continue downloading compressed 256 kbps AAC files. Recently Apple announced that they are upgrading the Apple Music library into ALAC (Apple version of FLAC), Amazon followed by offering Amazon Music HD with no extra charge.
