Also, spytify, for those that are afraid of providing or using your credentials. Disadvantage, can't fast forward, just record in realtime.
https://github.com/tehforsch/striputary
which also records the music (meaning you need to wait for the entire length of the playlist for it to finish) and cuts it into songs. It doesn't require you to provide any credentials (and it should in principle work with other streaming services as well, but I haven't tried). It is probably not the smoothest user experience, given that nobody except me has ever used it, but I've successfully recorded thousands of albums with it so far.
There are some leaks indicating that Spotify is working on a higher quality plan, but it hasn't happened yet.
It's the same as re-encoding a photo to JPEG repeatedly. Every time you save (esp if the quality settings are a little bit different each time, or if a different encoder is used) you get a few more artifacts.
At high enough quality settings though, you can do this many times before the result is noticeable. So I bet the quality from re-encoding a Spotify song once is inaudible to most people, just like you can brighten a JPEG and save it without suddenly seeing lots of rectangles everywhere.
A bad transcode means that during the transcode process, the file has either been converted to a lossy format more than once, or the file has been converted from lossy to lossless. Bad transcodes are prohibited on What.CD.[0]
[0]https://opentrackers.org/whatinterviewprep.com/prepare-for-t...