Bringing over Apple Music and Video purchases to Linux?

Ask Fedora
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I’m asking something both on behalf of someone I know and for myself as people who are curious to eventually migrate away from the Apple ecosystem, at least for desktop and laptop computers. May or may not also get rid of phones and tablets.

If someone wanted to completely move from Mac to Linux, how might media purchases made through the iTunes/Apple Music and Apple Video apps be brought over to a Linux machine? Not trying to re-encode anything, just wanting to be able to listen to the same audio files and watch the same video files that were accrued on those apps instead of leaving them behind on the Mac. We’ve had Apple devices for years and have accrued many dollars of purchases, would be a shame to let that go to waste. And the “I bought it so I should be able to keep it/take it with me” mindset is also coming into play.

Taking a step back, I’m not really even sure which file formats are proprietary or protected in the first place and would even need to be converted to another file format to be playable on Linux. Looking through files in my Music and Video libraries for example, I’m seeing .m4a “Apple MPEG-4 audio”, .m4p “protected MPEG-4 audio” (I think these are music files that were purchased on a different iTunes account and require a password to authorize) and .m4v “Apple MPEG-4 movie” files. Are any and all Apple file formats DRM-protected, or only certain ones? I could use some background info on this.

For anything that is proprietary or protected, how might you convert the files to something playable on Linux? I know not all flavors of Linux are the same so I’m guessing the exact steps would be different between Fedora and say, Ubuntu, but some general direction on modern solutions would be nice. Trying to search this online has mainly just led me to forum threads that are like 9+ years old and are surely outdated.

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Hi Ashley
DRM is an issue that does restrict what you should be able to do with stuff you bought, and its a balance between media owners thinking they have licensed you to use it verses own it, and your and my view of I bought it i can do what i want with it, (other than sharing it with millions of course).
The best thing to do is get up and running with linux on a PC if you can to start with, and then see what plays and what does not play using the various codecs available in the linux eco system, there are many.
vlc is always a good bet, you could even try that on macOSX as that has its own codecs.
However if apple has encrypted those media files , and only unlocks them with its players, then you maybe out of luck.
There are of course other places to find that media, that you have already paid the artist for …
its not copyright theft if you already have a license to play it if you see what i mean.
Charity shops have so many CD;s/DVD’s they cant give them away.
nntp news groups, are another avenue.
regards peter

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If you want to run the proprietary software of Apple Music you can do with Wine or use Snap.

There is also a solution with the web interface of Apple Music (m u s i c. a p p l e. c o m)

I am using duckduckgo.com to search “aple music & videos on linux” . It shows you mostly a date of the content so that you can scroll and choose.

An other app I found is Cider