App to Convert Lossless Audio on macOS
There are several tools out there, some of them professional and some of them only CLI-based, to convert lossless audio files on macOS. I was specifically looking for a convertor that is preferably free or more affordable and has a GUI support for casual uses. In my specific cases, I happen to have quite a bit of FLAC, ones that I ripped from old CDs, and Apple Music uses ALAC, once proprietary turned open source codec.
The app in question is called XLD. It is free and the code is available on SourceForge. The developer website leads to two mirror websites for download; if SourceForge is unavailable for whatever reason, try the “local mirror” one, as I had better luck there.
If the installed app does not open with macOS malware risk popup*, there is a way to open it regardless. Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security, from Security section, choose “Open Anyway” for XLD. Do make sure the disk image file is from the developer’s website.
* The popup does not mean macOS has detected a malware. Instead, it means it is not notarized by Apple. Again, if the Gatekeeper warns of an app, do be sure the origin of it before overriding it.
The app itself is quite straight forward. I choose “Apple Lossless”, and it can handle the conversion task I would want it to do in batch. There are other use cases and other features; it is more than a simple convertor. But I believe most macOS users would use it to convert FLAC or Ogg Vorbis. Unlike some of the other alternatives, XLD also supports Apple Silicon natively.