I intend to rip some high-quality music files from a streaming service using the WASAPI protocol and I was wondering if the process will affect the audio.
The audio files I will be streaming are 24 bit lossless and I will be streaming them via the Blustacks emulator. My audio setup is a standard one (Realtek High Def Audio)
My question is: will I retain full quality of the audio files or will this process (onboard sound card, volume during recording etc) affect the quality of the recording?
NB I am not doing anything illegal, I have bought the rights to the content and I’m just trying to save time, skipping the step of shipping over the CD’s which will take a month or more.
There are many places where losses could occur.
Is the audio stream really lossless? If it is, then the bit-rate will be huge, so the chance of dropped network packets will be high.
Does the Blustacks emulator support “hi-res” audio?
Does the media player in the emulator support “hi-res” audio?
Does the audio connection between the emulator and the Windows sound system support hi-res audio?
Are both the player, and the emulator able to bypass volume scaling / mixing?
If you set the Realtek device to use the hi-res format in exclusive mode, then Audacity “should” receive exactly the same sample values that are received by the sound card - that is, the “recording in Audacity” step “should” be lossless, but not all sound card drivers do that.
Your best chance of getting a lossless copy is to download the file rather than record it.
As to whether the process will “affect the quality of the recording”, the sound quality will only be affected if there are losses that are sufficiently large as to be audible. It’s worth noting that when playing a high quality MP3, the losses caused by analog components (amplifier, speakers / headphones, listening environment …) are hugely greater than the losses caused by high bit-rate MP3 encoding.