Note: I'm not foolish enough to think people won't use this article for nefarious purposes such as recording lossless music from streaming services. What follows is a step-by-step guide to recording music using Audio Hijack. Thanks to software from Rogue Amoeba called Audio Hijack we can now capture bit perfect audio from nearly anything and save it on our hard drives for later analysis.
Because streaming services don't store music on our hard drives in the traditional sense we have to get a little creative. In the past we simply imported the file stored on our hard drive into one of the analysis applications and we had our answers. Now that audiophiles are streaming lossless 16 bit / 44.1 kHz music from services such as TIDAL HIFI, Qobuz, and Deezer, the question of how to analyze this music becomes relevant. A much more interesting, and more telling, indicator of sound quality can be seen when analyzing a track's waveform for dynamic range compression. This type of analysis can be interesting when it reveals a high resolution album was simply upsampled from at 16 bit / 44.1 kHz version. Since the dawn of ripping CDs and downloading high resolution music people have been subjecting the files to audio analysis through applications such as Audacity and Adobe Audition.
