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If I use audacity to record sound from foobar or itunes or vlc, do I loose quality?

Specifically, i'd like to press play on the program and record on audacity.

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Is there a specific way you plan to that? or this is just a general question? – Eugene S yesterday
@EugeneS record by pressing record on audacity. i hope i understood what you were asking. – kirill_igum yesterday
How are you making sure that Audacity is capturing the audio you want to record? I personally don't know if it's even possible. As far as know, Audacity only allows you to record from a physical input (but I can be wrong...) – Eugene S yesterday
And yes, I was wrong. Here: audacity.sourceforge.net/help/… there is an explanation how to do it.. – Eugene S yesterday
@EugeneS yes, exactly. but i still don't understand if it's a digital signal or digital->analog->digital – kirill_igum yesterday
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If you are able to directly capture the digital feed and you record to a lossless format that matches the bit depth and sample rate of the original source, then no, you should not lose any quality. If it is going threw an analog hole, then yes, you will.

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that is what i was interested. when is the signal converted to analog. – kirill_igum yesterday
This is the rephrased question :) – Eugene S yesterday
@kirill_igum - that's going to depend on your sound card and the drivers it is using. It could be implemented as either. It entirely depends on how they decided to wire things up and we couldn't tell you with any degree of certainty here without a lot more information and then it would be extremely localized and thus not a good fit for a Q/A format. – AJ Henderson yesterday

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