Couple of questions regarding moving from m4a to flac on a large song library mostly encoded using the apple lossless format. A lot of time was spent initially running the collection through itunes and putting it on a server. We are not using itunes to play the collection any longer and wish we had gone in the flac direction from the beginning.

Questions:

1) Is this possible? How can I do this?

2) Is it a terrible idea?

It is possible, there is an ALAC decoder here.

You shouldn't have any trouble transcoding, as both formats are lossless. You might run into a problem preserving the tags you have. Shell scrips can be written to move tags to the new files, or if you're on Windows, you could use a frontend like foobar2000.

If you end up going the foobar2000 route, there's an ALAC decoder plugin available here.

Only for m4a files that are lossy.

I recommend the fb2k route myself.

Since m4a is the extension of an aac file without DRM (m4p with DRM), m4a to FLAC could be completely useless (m4a isn't lossless all the time!).

.m4a is also used by Apple Lossless

just make sure that all of your selected m4a files are lossless, then convert to flac with foobar2000


later

Thanks all for your info. Much appreciated. I will try the foobar2000 flac converter.

I have the same inquire, however I have some m4a files that are ALAC and some that are lossy. Any way to convert the files that are lossless but leave out the lossy ones ? I dont want to convert files to FLAC that arent lossless to begin with. Duh.

In Foobar you can filter on codec if I'm not mistaken. Use it to show only the ALAC's and you're good to go.