freac VS FFaudioConverter

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/

Personally I just use the ffmpeg cli, but for GUIs, SoundConverter and FFaudioConverter look good.