Most efficient way to 'export' iTunes protected aac to FLAC (for personal use)?

Question

What's the most efficient way to export tunes bought with iTunes that are protected aac to FLAC for playing on other music hardware (still for personal use)?

2 methods I can think of so far are:

1. make a playlist of all the purchased songs in the library, rip to CD, then rip the CD to FLAC. Disadvantage: with 80+ tunes, this would require multiple CDs. But I'm assuming that titles of the tunes are recorded as CD-text, is this true?

2. same as above but instead of ripping to CD, use SoundFlower to record the output. Disadvantage: no CDs required but will have to manually split the recording into each track and name it.

Any better ideas? Thanks.

Answer 1

The free solution is to use iTunes playlist to burn to CD but instead of burning to a CD, burn to a "virtual CD", having already installed the Free full-featured 15 day trial of Virtual CD-RW. iTunes will see this like any other regular drive.

Then on a Windows machine (or via BootCamp) use CueTools open source software to extract out to FLAC the audio from the .bin (helped by.cue files) that the Virtual CD-RW application generated.

Then use the playlist .m3u .txt or .xml file to rename the extracted flac files as their artist - song or use MusicBrainz Picard to fingerprint them or write a batch script to rename the files from the iTunes playlist file.

The result should be that you would have FLAC files that have the same audio fidelity when played as playing them from iTunes. Of course, the FLAC files are much larger at around 6 times the size or more than the original protected m4p files but with storage being cheaper: multi-terabyte drives large capacity micro SD cards, this is not so much as an issue compared to when lossy compressed audio files became popular for their smaller size. In any case, my only motivation is for personal use and freedom to play my purchased music on any of my own devices, independent of application, not to illegally distribute.

Answer 2

Try uploading all your music to itunes match. In my experience, when you re-download it all of the protection has been removed.

Answer 3

Have you looked at xACT? I think I've been using this software for more than ten years (wow, I can't believe it), and the author is still actively developing it. Its really good stuff.

Also, AAC is lossy, and FLAC is lossless, so converting AAC to FLAC really isn't appropriate. Are you sure that your files are AAC? If the files have a suffix of .m4a, this doesn't mean that the audio necessarily is AAC, as it could also be ALAC, in which case it would be appropriate to convert from ALAC to FLAC, and xACT can help you do that. First you'd decode your files to an uncompressed format, either AIFF or WAV, then reencode to lossless flac. There is no generation loss with this method.