Seedy, I've given up on downloading unofficial stuff - I always seemed to end up picking up nasties on my computer. I'd dearly love to get back all the Kiss transmissions and other disenchanted stuff I lost when my old external hard drive went pop a year or two ago, but I don't have the stomach or the patience to trawl through a load of dodgy download sites and risk infecting my pc.
When I lost my hard drive (ironically not to a virus, it was just old and stopped working), I bought everything I could again from fsoldigital, but lots of transmissions, EBS shows etc were not for sale any more. Nowadays, I only pick up what I can find on soundcloud, but thankfully there's plenty of other good music out there and not enough hours in the day as it is.
You probably can buy stuff from there as an individual, but bear in mind they'll cost like £100s or maybe £1000s. Production music really aint cheap due to the licenses involved.
I love FSOL and some of their music can, and still does, affect me like no other music can. But I draw the line somewhere. There is plenty of other very good music out there (much of it absolutely free, I might add). I enjoyed the Nu Psychedelia, but I find the circumstances around it irritating, so I probably won't bother listening to it again. Life's too short. I will content myself with the new EPs and the Terminal Window stuff (for which great credit and thanks to all involved, if they're reading), and will wait until something not good enough for Extreme is deemed suitable to be sold to us plebs on fsoldigital.
The sound that plays when you browse the site is 128 kbps MP3,
so if you record it with Audacity in .WAV, you don't get any improvement,
you just upscale the format from 128 kbps to 1411 kbps and fill everything during the up-scaling with blank pieces of silence.
So you achieve nothing. It's better to just snatch the 128 kbps audio file from your browser cache and/or wait until someone shares it that actually bought the lossless files from the website.
I don't know where you DL your stuff from, but I haven't had a virus/malware in years. There's plenty of free AV programs that will protect you well enough (and give you real time defense too) and are super easy to set up. It's not the dark ages anymore. Also, the dodgiest sites are pretty easy to spot; they usually try to make you use some "downloader" or try to install some crap.
Even if you don't DL illegal stuff you should have a proper firewall and antivirus. I just don't like the idea of programs connecting to the net without of me knowing what they're doing. There's also a wonderful little browser extension called "WOT" which will warn you when you enter dodgy sites (based on their ratings and reputation) and the ratings are based on community reports. I HIGHLY recommend it.