Apple Music Re-Download My Library

[kagharaht]

A few weeks ago I had to "Erase All Contents and Settings" on my new iMac M3 I bought in December 2023. Reason it the Sonoma update did a royal job screwing up the new iMac. The the point the screen had gone pink and rebooted on its own, built in App unexpectedly quitting, BT issues...so on. I set up the iMac clean, no migration from anything. Just start fresh and sync everything back from the cloud. Which so far has fixed everything. Since I have everything on the cloud including Albums I had imported from my old CD collection, will they download in the highest quality available? Lossless? or just AAC 256 for some and some Lossless? I get conflicting information on the "internets" and was wondering has anyone done this and confirm what quality gets redownloaded.

 

[kagharaht]

So I did one that says Lossless and it was 50MB in size. Wow.

 

[WebHead]

Hmmmm, interesting (and disturbing), I'll soon be re-downloading my library and assumed the default was still AAC+ (256k).

 

[kagharaht]

Ok i downloaded some from iTunes Match that came from my old CD collection. They downloaded as 256AAC format. So it was 6mb. If i download the ones purchased in iTunes Store and available lossless it will download lossless which is awesome quality but really huge files.

So now I have to decide. Do i really want to have these all downloaded in my iMac so that I can play them if we have no internet connection? Which is rare these days