ATRACTool-Reloaded VS freac

If your recordings are exclusively LP2/4, you can use ATRACtool to convert them to LPCM WAV and there's a potential that this ~2015-era tool will get a better result than the Type-S decks

Whoops! Sorry for leaving that out - that's at3tool.exe, packaged for easy-ish use here: https://github.com/XyLe-GBP/ATRACTool-Reloaded

If you're planning on AT3+ mode recordings, either use SonicStage or get a copy of ATRACtool, which can convert AT3 files to WAV files which you can then drop in your DAW or re-cmpress to "literally anything else" per your needs.

In Homebrew mode, you'll get the raw ATRAC off the disc. If you have windows, you can then use ATRACtool to convert LP-mode tracks to WAVs to re-encode. For SP mode tracks, you'll be using VLC or ffmpeg, which is "fine" but if these are quality-critical recordings you may like the results you get better using the line output on the MDS-NT1 or a NetMD deck that has digital optical audio output, depending.

Right now: Yes, for LP2 and LP4 audio. [other formats] can be converted to ATRAC3 132/66 using a tool like ATRACtool. If you use the "remote encoder" option in Web Minidisc, it's using this tool under the hood to do the conversion.

Best: using the remote encoder option on web.minidisc.wiki or using the ATRACtool

If these are LP2 or LP4 recordings, you can achieve Sony-quality conversions on your computer by renaming the AEA files to OMA and using ATRACtool.

Oh yeah, the ATRAC tool I was using is here: https://github.com/XyLe-GBP/ATRACTool-Reloaded

For ATRAC3plus on HiMD, you may be able to avoid the open source codecs by using https://github.com/XyLe-GBP/ATRACTool-Reloaded - but I haven't tried it myself and I don't know how well it works with the files WebMD pro creates. It outright won't support ATRAC1 for SP files, but that at least gets you worked around for HiMD and MDLP.

Seconding basically everything that's been said here, but should you ever find yourself in need of a good file converter, I like and use fre:ac (www.freac.org), an open source Swiss army knife for audio formats.

That's a lot of steps! I believe there's FLAC rippers for Tidal, that may make it easier to use WebMD or SonicStage. I use https://www.freac.org/ to convert from FLAC (which I rip my CDs in) to WMA Lossless (which SonicStage can use) - Web Minidisc can use FLAC directly, as well.

You might want to use a tool like https://www.freac.org for the conversion.

I use fre:ac personally - https://www.freac.org

A lot of bootlegs are already ripped and available. wondering if the ones you have are the ones that are already available. you can download https://www.freac.org/ and rip em.

https://www.freac.org/ my go-to for a loooong time

What I was doing when I want 352k AT3+ files was to use https://www.freac.org/ to convert FLACs to WMA Lossless files which SonicStage 4.3 can read, then hook up the HiMD machines, pick the songs/album/whatever, and transfer them at 352k. It does the transcode on the fly but you can pick "fast" vs. "quality" modes, either should really be good but I did "quality" because the 10-year-old computer I'm doing it on should be 2-5x faster than an average computer in 2007 when SS4.3 was released so it's not that big of a deal.

If you need to convert FLAC/AAC/ALAC/whatever to a format SonicStage supports (LPCM WAV or lossless WMA) - you can use a tool like the Free Audio Converter (FRE:AC).

For lossless or high-resolution audio, I use a tool called FREAC to convert FLAC/ALAC and anything else SonicStage itself can't use to WMA Lossless, which gets you both proper metadata support and CD quality lossless files.

fre:ac does pretty much everything you could want: https://www.freac.org/