How can I quickly sort lossless ALAC .m4a files from lossy .m4a files?

Go to the Songs view in iTunes, and enable & sort it by the bitrate column. Everything above 320 kb/s is lossless. Just select them all and export them as a playlist and you'll have your list of file names.

Open your actual iTunes Media folder in Finder. If you haven't moved it, then it should be ~/Music/iTunes, although if it's not there, then check iTunes>Preferences...>Advanced>iTunes Media folder location

From there, you can sort by kind.

weitrhino1 wrote:

I appreciate that suggestion, however it's not real helpful to sort within iTunes because you'll still have to go to each individual file through the finder in order to convert it to FLAC. By employing a smart folder through spotlight, the finder keeps track of just the remaining files yet to be converted. Once changed to FLAC they disappear from the smart folder because they no longer meet the filtering criteria. Your suggestion could be useful for files that may or may not necessarily have been properly sorted by smart filtering. Such outliers were few by comparison after the bulk of ALAC m4a files were identified.

The second reason iTunes would not have been helpful initially is because these were backup files I needed to sort, as explained in the post above earlier today, not files in the iTunes library.

Well, if you ask in an iTunes forum, you get iTunes-based answers. 😉

Anyway, your solution sounds fine. AAC/256 runs about 2 MB per minute of music, and ALAC around 5 MB per minute, so a cutoff of 20 MB is a good place to start, and then you can sort from there.

To end this debate on a note. I just found the way myself and thought I'd add it. iTunes is picky with the format so at first I created a smart folder that has Kind set to 'contains' and the word 'Lossless'.

Upon realizing that that actually works I brought up the 'Kind' tab in iTunes and typed it in the way it was shown on that tab, as is below:

I don't have any WAV files in my iTunes but I imagine there could be a mix-up with other lossless formats otherwise, heres my smart folders box in case it helps.

Hope this helps clear up the problem. Only just figured it out myself haha.

🙂

This little freeware app/project:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mediainfo/

helped me with the same problem. After I found this discussion, I found the app mentioned in another discussion on same basic topic on stackoverflow.com.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10934936/determine-whether-an-audio-file-is-e ncoded-in-apple-lossless-alac

There are warnings on some of the one star reviews on soundforge that it installs some kind of crapware. Not on my Mac it didn't. Either the developer took it out or it was just trolls doing their thing.

There are plenty of higher reviews, and I will be adding mine.

This has been a problem for me for years. And the only way I was able to work-around it was to open the files in iTunes, which I don't like doing, because I don't keep any audio files in my iTunes Library, after I back them up on external drives, and then iTunes Match them (either matching or uploading).

But this app solves the problem, at least for me. Just what the (Mac) doctor ordered !😎

P.S. I am running Lion still on 2011 MBA. Not sure if this still works on later OS X versions or earlier ones for that matter. YMMV

I don't keep any audio files in my iTunes Library, after I back them up on external drives, and then iTunes Match them (either matching or uploading).

Shakurav,

I assume you are aware that the matched files are all lossy files. Anything that iTunes Match can match will use a store copy in AAC/256, and any remaining lossless files that need uploading will be transcoded to AAC/256.

With respect to the OP's orginal question of distinguishing lossy from lossless, that is probably not what was intended.

Put your music library in "Songs" view, and use the Kind field. It easily distinguishes ALAC from AAC.

If you do not have a column for Kind, go to View > Show View Options and enable it.

Are you sure? Note that the "kind" sorting (not arranging) in list view does a better job than just regular "arranging".