> iTunes [is] lossless

Is it? As far as I know, lossless is only offered for the Apple Music streaming service, but not for downloads from the iTunes store, which remain as 256K AAC files.

This may be semantics, and I am not sure what counts as Apple Music versus iTunes these days, but you can download all files for offline listening in Apple Music. I assume if you can download a lossless file from Apple Music that you can also buy that same file in the iTunes store and then download it.

They both use the same app for playback, so this is a tad confusing.

Yes, but AFAIK things you download via your Apple Music subscription are still DRM-protected and can only be listened to as long as your subscription remains active.

Whereas the iTunes store downloads are a one time-purchase and have no DRM, so they're yours to keep.

Do you retain ownership of the files upon cancelling your membership? If not, I wouldn't consider that "acquiring" so much as "borrowing".

You do. They have some kind of a watermark or metadata specific to your copy but don't have DRM.

Look at that subtle off-white metadata. Oh my god, it even has a watermark.

Just the right amount of restriction. It just works.

Nice! It's about time. Too bad they spent almost two decades doing the opposite, or I'd still have my account.

iTunes music has been DRM free since 2009 (with some exceptions, probably).

Was that retroactively applied? Because my music from pre-2009 remained DRM'd, but maybe I just needed to re-download them. On top of that, it was all AAC, and I regularly had to convert the files to be usable anywhere but Apple's products. It became such a chore, that I gave up on the Apple music ecosystem entirely, and I don't really have any regrets about it.

Same here. I had 2 or 3 ipods back in the day and loved it although they had a tendency to fail on me. Eventually, I decided to remove my paid-for downloads off of my ipod. That is when I discovered Apple's DRM and the fact that iTunes was a totally closed universe. I had to abandon all my tunes and I was very mad. That was maybe 2007ish? I have not owned another Apple product of any kind since. They lost me for life not that it seems to have hurt them any.

VLC has supported AAC from at least 2006 onwards [1]. Yeah conversion has always been a pain in the butt but back in the time you had to convert between everything all the time anyway (the nastiest example being wma-based devices like the Zune).

[1] https://wiki.videolan.org/index.php?title=Advanced_Audio_Cod...

Only for iTunes ones, not Apple Music.

The problem is the available library, and also, the need to convert to FLAC and re-tag for proper archival is no improvement over CDs.