Phil,

Thanks a lot. Seems to be that if you stream at say 320k mp3, what will happen is that it will be decoded, imported into audacity, then when you save, it will be recoded into FLAC or WAV or whatever you choose.

Probably the thing to do is take the FLAC version in the first place, then save to FLAC from Audacity, and there should be no losses.

My service has an offline listening service as it happens, so you can use their app and download and then sign in, in some way, not sure whether that is on or off line, and play without re-streaming. If you leave the service all those saved tracks go. And having done this on one album, I cannot for the life of me find where they have stored the tracks.

Today I was on the service, which is generally really nice, and got an album up. It turns out that all tracks cannot be either listened to online or downloaded, but have to be bought.

This is basically a totally irritating business. I like to use my little Sandisk player sometimes when out, which is cheap and cheerful but has quite extraordinary sound quality for the price -- and more importantly, for the minimal weight and bulk. But the restrictions imposed by the streaming service with the aim of preserving copyright seem utterly ridiculous by comparison to the freedom you have with a bought CD, which you can rip and move around and listen to on whatever you want.

I am now looking at mplayer, which lets you send the user agent string of your choice, as well as do user name and password. Probably there will be some ingenious and cunning way they have thought of to prevent that!

Peter