freac VS FlexASIO

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/

I had a similar issue with my setup, I suggest using FLEXASIO. Youll need to download flexasio and the gui component to use it. https://github.com/dechamps/FlexASIO

The problem I have with FlexASIO is that it only supports having 1 input while the katana requires multiple. See: https://github.com/dechamps/FlexASIO/issues/147

The UMC-22 has a budget Midas-type pre-amp which is hard to beat under $200. That said, the UMC-22 also has terrible ASIO4ALL based drivers which can partially be worked around by using something like FlexASIO. Ultimately though, the drivers won't matter unless you are using heavier VST plugins for your voice/audio input.

FlexASIO allows none exclusive mode but it does it in a different way to regular ASIO drivers. You will have to give it a try to see if it can provide a latency that is acceptable. It is meant to work with more hardware than regular ASIO drivers. I suspect that latency might be compromised somewhat but give it a try to see if it works okay for you. It does explain how it works compared to other ASIO drivers on the github page.

FlexASIO

https://github.com/dechamps/FlexASIO/releases

FlexASIO is the modern and IMO better alternative to ASIO4ALL, just sayin.

You could try https://github.com/dechamps/FlexASIO It's a universal asio driver that allows non-exclusive mode

flex asio - https://github.com/dechamps/FlexASIO/tree/flexasio-1.9 and https://github.com/flipswitchingmonkey/FlexASIO_GUI