Mac Mini to The Rescue [The Ali G Mini Disc Saga]

So recently SBC released a full album as his iconic character Alistair “Ali G” Graham, so I decided to download the album, or at least try to. The issue was most platforms promoting it were streaming only, other than the iTunes Store.

Which was a major issue as someone using Linux on everything other than a single Mac mini I mostly use for my custom home assistant “Mag” so she can use some cheap network speakers around the apartment.

Well, I later found out the album was on Qobuz, which would have saved me the trouble, but where’s the fun in that?

Qobuz is a DRM-free platform that I’ve used for albums like The Sinister Urge by Rob Zombie and Digitalia by Darren Smith, both in uncompressed “Red Book” audio. But in case anyone has issues like I did, let me walk you through how to get from legally bought iTunes music to a MiniDisc or to a hi-res audio player.

First you’re gonna need a Mac. I am doing this on an older Intel Mac mini but most people who use iTunes have Apple Silicon Macs.

Once you download your album from the iTunes Store, most songs since 2009 are DRM-free, so there’s no real need to break anything.

The fix is quite simple for taking an M4A file, the type that iTunes gives you, and making it into a FLAC file. You can later fix the tags and convert it into whatever format you want with this simple command:

ffmpeg -i "song.m4a" -c:a flac "song.flac"

There is also dBpoweramp, a paid program that runs $48 USD. I used to use it a lot back in my days working in radio since it would help keep tags clean by checking MusicBrainz and Discogs, but for this we don’t need it since it’s a single album.

At this point I had my copy of the album, but then I had to take the album files and put them onto a MiniDisc. We’re blessed that Linux has a lot of tools for moving songs onto a MiniDisc.

You’ve got options like the Web MiniDisc App [for NetMD players] from Stefano Brilli, or QHiMDTransfer. I used QHiMDTransfer for this project since I had a nicer HiMD player on hand.

Once I was done I had the new album from Ali G on a metallic blue MiniDisc since it matched his iconic puffy jacket. I know this is a somewhat short post but I hope it helps people trying to get Apple releases into FLAC.