How can I convert WAV to Apple lossless in the terminal?

Question

I have a lot of WAV files that I do not wish to import into iTunes to convert. There are too many. I would like a way to convert these to Apple lossless in the terminal before importing to iTunes.

Answer 1

You'll need to make a short bash for loop in a script (or xargs) but the command in question you care about is:

afconvert -d alac in.wav out.m4a

More info can be found by running man afconvert or afconvert -h.