Convert Flac to Apple Lossless With FFmpeg

I'm a longtime Apple Music user. Most of my so-called music collection is on the streaming service. However, I occasionally buy rare or remastered releases ripped from CDs. These releases are usually in the FLAC format, which Apple Music doesn't support. But I've found an easy workaround that allows me to organize and play albums on the go.

The centerpiece of the workaround is FFmpeg. So if you don't already have it installed, it's worth installing now:

brew install ffmpeg

Homebrew Formula

When the tool is ready to use, navigate to the folder containing the FLAC files and run the following script:

for file in *.flac; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -acodec alac -vcodec copy "`basename "$file" .flac`.m4a"; done; mkdir flac; mkdir alac; for file in *.flac; do mv "$file" "flac/"; done; for file in *.m4a; do mv "$file" "alac/"; done;

Silly One-liner Converting FLAC to ALAC

Susumu Hirasawa – Siren [Limited Edition]

The bash script converts the audio to the Apple Lossless format (*.m4a) and moves the files to the alac directory:

Finally, the alac directory can be dragged to Apple Music to import the album and upload its tracks to the cloud.

The Uploaded Album