The following maths were done by the creator of OctaMED; for a streamed recording of a 4 channel module (with the pitch range available to Amigas; that is a maximum of ~28khz at 8 bit sample quality each) you'd need to record the tune at 4Ghz for it to be lossless.
This will of course only increase with more channels and the capability to play higher quality/frequency samples.
Therefore recording a 4 channel mod at 40000hz is recording the tune at ~1% quality. If you want to get semantic about lossiness, recording sequenced tracks to any sampled format is not the way to go either.
No! Some of you are still way off! :( cooljacker, your page 2 statement is sensible on from a practical point of view, but it's completely misleading with regards to archiving.
hcs gets it. It's not about getting truly "lossless" files or magically transforming things into CD-quality, it's about preventing further loss.
If you're going to archive streamed files (I'm talking about personal archives, not any kind of proposed share for here or elsewhere on the web), rip it to WAV / FLAC if you've got the space. You'll have a truly compatible snapshot of the original stream's output, free to use on any device / software without having to rely on vgmstream.
If you keep doing lossy -> lossy -> lossy -> lossy, it's like photocopying a photocopy of a faxed photocopy (that originated from a mimeograph).
Pretty much my point. I say personal archiving in FLAC is the way to go regardless if its lossy sourced or not iust to prevent any more loss.
Also yes I'm a neat-freak and love to have everything tagged and labeled in order. Besides you can't burn a hardfile to a CD expecting to be a playable audio format.
"If you keep doing lossy -> lossy -> lossy -> lossy, it's like photocopying a photocopy of a faxed photocopy (that originated from a mimeograph)."
I wouldn't say it's quite that bad. It's a judgment call. Personally I keep the original formats and convert to whatever format is convenient when I want to listen to them; if only the lossless conversion was there I could do the same thing, but if they were MP3'd I wouldn't have any good option but to stick with whatever encoding settings the converter chose.