Itunes Match DRM or Not?
I'm so confused. I have my entire music library in what was iTunes and is now Music. The vast majority of this came from ripping all my CD's into iTunes but over the years there have been many, many purchases of songs and albums in the iTunes/Music Store.
I also have iTunes Match as I listen a lot to my library on my iPhone and on different computers etc.
By accident I recently clicked on the download icon for one song and noticed that whilst I didn't end up with a duplicate in the Music library, when I looked at my hard drive, I had a new m4a file of that song but with a "1" added to the end of the file name.
Looking at the audio properties of both files, the one that was downloaded is at a higher bitrate and is twice the size of the original one on my hard drive.
As I now work from home, I don't really need iTunes Match as much and so I was considering dropping it but are songs downloaded through iTunes Match DRM'd or not? I've read conflicting accounts and it seems also that if you have an Apple Music subscription (I do not), you can specify to stream and download in a lossless format but these are DRM'd. I don't seem to have an option to specify lossless for stream or download in Music (presumably because I don't have a subscription) but I do have the import function set to lossless for when I rip CD's.
I just don't want to download 22K songs only to find they are all DRM'd.
Mac Studio