Determine whether an audio file is encoded in Apple Lossless (ALAC)

Question

There are a number of audio files that have .m4a suffix and these are encoded in one of AAC or Apple Lossless (ALAC). I want to choose only audio files encoded in Apple Lossless of them. Is there any way to determine this? I tried FFmpeg, but it says all of them are encoded in AAC.

Edit: I am currently on Windows.

Answer 1

If you have the FFmpeg package, you should have ffprobe.

Give this a try:

ffprobe -v error -select_streams a:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 file.m4a

• -v error: to hide the startup text
• -select_streams a:0: to select the first audio track
• -show_entries stream=codec_name: to display only the codec type
• -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1: to remove extra formatting

This will print out just aac or alac. Perfect for scripting.