I am about to digitize a few albums that never made it to CD. Is there any real difference in the software that is used to record the signal from the sound card’s line-in port?

I'm not looking to do any processing at this point, just want the best quality WAV generated from the music coming over the line-in port.

I plan to use Audacity, but also have considered Goldwave or Adobe Audition.

Thanks.

There shouldn't be; the only quality differences possible should be dependant on the type of sound card you are recording to and the sampling rate and bit depth of your recorded digital audio.

There may be a few defective recording programs but most work perfectly well. The major differences are that some are limited in what they will capture. Some programs are limited to 16 bit and to one, or a few, basic sampling rates. These will work with 24 bit soundcards but will not caputre the lower eight bits.

If you intend to do some clean-up after you record, there are some advantages in capturing into a floating point format. Audacity and Audition will, I don't know about Goldwave. You should do all processing while in the floating point format, then convert to your final format only at the end (e.g. 16 bit, 44.1kHz for CD, mp3 for on-line storage, etc.)

Might I offer an alternate point of view?

If maroonmike is planning on recording domestic analogue sources (eg. vinyl LPs, cassettes), then the advantages Andy refers to are theoretical rather than practical. The dynamic range available from such sources is so low that you would have to do an awful lot of processing before the rounding errors accumulated sufficiently to bring the additional quantisation noise above the noise floor of the original source.

There is a good practical reason to record in 16/44.1: a number of useful tools only work at that format. Recording in a different format limits your tool choice, and when you're doing restoration work, you need the option of as many tools as possible.