Purchasing "Apple Music AAC audio files"?

Thanks, Ed. I comprehend. I have to, in effect, start from scratch, because there’s no quick and easy way to purchase an already downloaded "subscription" track! To me that seems to be an oversight on Apple's part. It seems Apple has built an overly high wall between "subscription" tracks and "purchased" tracks!

Thanks again, Ed!

I do intend to make a normal audio CD, and I’d forgotten that I could do it with unprotected AAC tracks. And yes, it’s true that streaming tends to obviate purchasing music and burning it to CD. I do have a reason, but I don’t want to state it here.

Thanks for your advice, but I didn’t purchase the song previously. I obtained it on my iPad as part of my Apple Music subscription, and I then put it into the designated playlist. Later on, I downloaded the track to iTunes on my Mac, where it is shown as an "Apple Music audio file." The instructions you pointed me to assume I’m using the Apple Music app on my Mac, but I’m not. As I said in the original post, I have an older Mac that cannot be updated to the most recent version of MacOS and does not support the Music app, AFAIK. I gather you want me to delete the version of the track that I have already downloaded to my Mac's iTunes library and then re-access the same track at the iTunes Store, buy it, and re-download the purchased track to my iTunes library, after which I would need to re-insert it into my playlist. Can that be right? That’s an awful lot of steps that I would have to repeat for each song in the playlist! Isn’t there a way that is quicker and simpler?

Cheers!