At the time, I reached out to Apple executive relations, and they put me in touch with a Senior Product Specialist. In fact, even after Apple expanded Apple Music back in late 2016 to include all the features of iTunes Match, the two catalogues remained entirely distinct.

So, it’s possible you might find a song on Apple Music in Canada that can only be purchased from the iTunes Store in the U.S. To make matters even more confusing, this can even vary between different countries. While there’s a considerable overlap between the music available in iTunes and Apple Music, they’re not the same thing, and it’s actually not uncommon to find an album or track that’s available in one, but not the other, thanks to the vagaries of music industry licensing requirements. Since Apple integrates the iTunes and Apple Music experience so well, it’s easy to miss the fact that it actually maintains two separate catalogues of music: the iTunes Store catalog and the Apple Music catalog. Several readers have already posed this question to us, we’re sad to report that tracks purchased on the iTunes Store will still be in the same 256kbps AAC “ lossy” format as they’ve been for the past decade or so. This is a roundabout way of saying that if you’re not an Apple Music subscriber, you won’t be able to download tracks in Lossless Audio.įurther, even if you are an Apple Music subscriber, any tracks you download in Lossless Audio will be Apple Music tracks, not your iTunes purchases - meaning you’ll only retain access to them as long as you’re an Apple Music subscriber. If you subscribe to Apple Music, you can redownload music in lossless only from the Apple Music catalog.

It doesn’t matter how many thousands of music tracks you’ve purchased from iTunes over the years if you don’t subscribe to Apple Music, you won’t be able to listen to them in Lossless Audio.Īpple tacitly outlined this in a recent support document, where it offered an oblique “no” to the question of iTunes purchases, emphasizing that tracks can only be downloaded in lossless audio from the Apple Music catalogue.Ĭan I redownload my iTunes purchases in lossless? In other words, Apple is not bringing Apple Lossless Audio to its more traditional iTunes library in any way. With all the excitement - and confusion - around the announcement that Apple Music is going Lossless, it seems that there’s one very significant limitation to the new service that Apple is being pretty quiet about: it’s only going to be available on Apple Music.

Itunes macbook download