There are dozens of freeware and shareware utilities for capturing audio and video streams. Go to cnet.com and do a search.
The thing about using SoundForge, is you were probably recording the audio in analog. Many of the capture apps actually intercept the audio in digital and create a wav file from that. You would be avoiding multiple d/a back to a/d conversions this way.
If will be doing a fair bit of this sort of thing, you might want to consider buying something like Total Recorder,
http://www.highcriteria.com/ Only $12 us, a very fair price for such a handy bit of software IMHO.
As for quality, that is going to be totaly dependant on the source material. Real Audio streams aren't what you would call CD quality, far from it, the quality of your recording can never be better than the quality of the source . And as the old addage goes - crap in, crap out. So don't expect to be able to make nice sounding cd's from low quality Real Audio streams. To maximise the quality of the stream, select the highest bitrate your connection supports, if the streaming site allows that option. If you are on a dialup, forget it, you'll need at least 300k for it to sound like anything other than poop. If you got at least 500k connection, and the streaming site supports higher quality at those bandwidths, you should be able to get some fairly decent results.
Good luck!
Duke
