audicity to record streaming audio

I've been listening to internet radio via my PC lately, and wanted to try to record some of it to put on my mp3 player for while I'm driving. I've previously used a program called SDK downloader (a fantastic program, BTW, and free to boot) to grab MMS audio streams... podcasts, concerts on demand, that sort of thing. But I either couldn't figure out how to set it up to grab real-time (live) streaming audio in WMA format from internet radio or it's just not designed to do it.

No problem, I says to myself, I've got audacity installed (curiosity, never really used it for anything particularly useful). I'll just record using that. So far so good. I run audacity and set it up to record the stream from my soundcard which works good but, jumpin' Jesus, 88Mb/minute of recording. Well, I don't happen to have a terabyte of free space. The default settings for recording in audacity are 192000 at 32-bit float bit depth. The streams I'm recording are marginal fidelity, some are 128K (the highest) but a lot of them are garbage... 32k and even lower. So I don't want to lose any quality. I've scoured web pages looking for this specific scenario, but gave up after an hour or so of looking. Can anyone tell me what rate and bit depth will give relatively lossless recording, hopefully allowing me to record at 10MB/min or less? The literature out there says that 44.1KHz 16-bit yields CD quality, but I really don't know enough about it to guess. 128kbps is marginal fidelity as far as I'm concerned... I certainly wouldn't BUY any music that's only encoded at 128kpbs, so I'm curious as to how the streaming bit-rates relate to "CD quality" and the like..


Sample question: If a CD is sampled at 44.1KHz, how can that be far far far far better quality than a 64kpbs music stream from the internet. Where is the information getting lost? Is it that the bit depth is different?

Thanks for any replies.

Dave

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