Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

OK, here is one frustrating thing: if you are trying to do a nice video (for friends) and want to get a nice soundtrack, the copy protection with Apple Music makes it impossible to add a track for your movie in Final Cut Pro.

Looking at what you actually get, if you ask for “Download ALAC,” which stands for Apple Lossless Compression, you get a strange file called “.movpkg” because it turns out Apple integrates copy protection for Apple TV and Apple Music high-resolution downloads. These are absolutely protected, and there is nothing you can do about it.

So you have two choices, you can either: a) go back to the your CDs and rip a track and then upload to Apple Music and then download in AAC format or b) use OBS Studio to get a 2-channel copy.

Ripping CDs and a reminder about Apple Matching

Well, this brings back two decades of memories. When Apple Music came out, they came up with an ingenious scheme for those of us with big CD collections. You could rip your CDs (which is legal) and make them MP3 or AAC (the Apple format) and then import them into Apple Music. This would then be “matched” with something that has in their coffers and then Apple would assume that you have a legal copy and would download an unprotected “.m4a” file rather than a protected AAC “.m4p” file.

It turns out that since they don’t know how to import FLAC, which is lossless, they just assume that all ALAC or lossless files are copy-protected, which is a bit of a bummer.

The net is:

1. If you have a big CD collection, it is a pain, but it pays to rip them all and then import them all into Apple Music
2. Turn on “iCloud Status” in Apple Music, and you will see it “Match” a file, which means it has validated that you have a legal copy of a son,g and then on other devices like your Mac or iPhone, you will get a “.m4a” fil,e which you can import into Final Cut Pro. Or it will say “Uploade,d” which means if you select it, you will download the “mp3” or “m4a” you originally uploaded
3. These files can be imported and used in FCP

If you have FLAC files from your CDs, convert them to M4a and retag them

Now, a lot of my CDs, I ripped into unencrypted lossless FLAC files, but Apple Music can’t import them, then you have to convert them to m4a (256Kbps is very close to hard to tell it’s not lossless) or to mp3 (use 320Kbps for that). The easy way to do this is:

1. Get your FLAC files and start Compressor
2. Drag them into the Compressor window, and then each will show with an output type. It is easier if you turn off the default output type.
3. Then drag and drop the AAC present to the files, and all will now convert to this.
4. Press Start Batch
5. One problem is that Compressor does not copy the tags, so load the free “Kid3 – Audio Tagger” and then drag both sets of files there
6. You can then click on a FLAC file, and on the righ,t you should see tags, then click COPY over there
7. Click on the the equivalent M4A file on the left and then on the rigth choose Paste
8. This will copy all the tags

Now, if you are like me and want to have all the filenames really nicely written. I like the form, “Album Artist – Album – Track – Song.m4a”, then with kid3 it’s not that intuitive what you need to do is:

1. Highlight all the files where the filenames that are not quite right
2. Make sure the tags are correct
3. Then in the function box on the upper right labeled “to”, you have to use their crazy handlebar syntax, “{album artist} – {album} – {track} – {title}”, and make sure this is correct in the text box.
4. Now there is the tricky part, click on the “From Tag2” or Tag1 so it populates. You will see a funny icon to the left of the file name appears, but the file names do not change
5. Now hit Save and only then will the filenames change. Geez.

Now you have to make sure on the machine where you have FCP, that you force downloads of the AAC files and not the ALAC ones since there are no unencrypted lossless files available:

1. Go to Music > Settings > Playback > Lossless Audio > Download and select “High Quality AAC (256Kbps)”
2. Now fine the music files you like and you can look at the iCloud Status and it should something like “Matched” or “Uploaded” but not “Apple Music”. Apple Music means copy protected.
3. Go to FCP and in the import section go to Music and it will show you all the valid files that are M4a files. You are there.

Recording with OBS Studio and converting with Compressor

Now if this doesn’t work or you really want some content, then there is another way to do this, you can record in real time the actual song. It’s pretty involved but here is what you do:

1. Start OBS Studio and create a “MacOS Audio Capture” Source in the second box from the left
2. Then choose properties and you can select Application and then find Music
3. When you now play a song with Apple Music, you will see the input source start to move and you are essentially looping back the Apple Music playback to an OBS file
4. Start Recording and you will get an alert about there being no Video. Don’t worry about that.
5. I have found the levels are oftentimes a little low, so you can apply the usual expander, compressor and then limiter to make sure you are getting loud enough music.
6. Now you wait as you play the music in real time and then when you are done, you stop recording and you will have an MP4 file (make sure you set the output format to MKV so that if there is a problem you don’t lose everything.
7. This file you can then convert to AAC or if you have issue to AIFF with compressor and then import them.

I had a bunch of issues with doing it this way:

1. Some of the audio had skips and “breathes”, moving to AIFF helps that
2. OBS Studio at one point just started recording mono audio, I had to wipe out the “~/Applications Support/OBS Studio” directory to blow away those preferences.

Net, net, the ripping CDS is the easiest way assuming the music you want is something you’ve ripped, but if it is a new track, the OBS is your only way

Copyrights and YouTube uploads

Now if you upload your videos to a site like Facebook or YouTube, they have automatic copyright detectors and they will in Facebook’s case zap your video. With YouTube, if you leave it unlisted, many times it will allow playback but not monetization. Or it may restrict it to certain countries (for instance you can’t playback if in Russia). So you are warned. This is really for personal use not for big videos on the Internet.