freac VS whipper

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/

https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

https://github.com/thomas-mc-work/most-possible-unattended-r...

Finding a good CD drive to rip them is the first step.

https://flemmingss.com/importing-data-from-discogs-and-other...

IME Discogs had the track data most often.

And obviously rip to flac

I have a music library on my home server that I use mopidy to play via the iris plugin integrated into my home assistant UI. It plays over Snapcast which streams over the network to multiple devices in the home with independent volume control. I can fire up the Snapcast client in my phone to get it going there as well, which does work over vpn if I'm away, though I generally just fire up the files from my phones SD card for out-of-home listening. I recently started using whipper on Linux to extract audio from craigslist cds.

https://mopidy.com/

https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

It's a Linux app that does CD Ripping. It runs in command line and can basically be semi automatic. https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

A drive to read CDs and Whipper (automatic bit-perfect checks, conversion to FLAC, and playlist file creation)

(eg. It's the first listed option for Whipper, which is the closest open-source alternative to Exact Audio Copy and a Python project with a ton of C dependencies... and I say this as someone who dislikes Docker enough that I still went through the hassle of the "Building" section.)