Jan 08

Fo’ Real

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How to convert RealAudio streams into WAV (which you can then encode to MP3):

  1. Install mplayer. It’s available for OS X and Linux.

  2. Put the following definitions in your .bashrc file:

    function radownload {   if [ "$1" = "--help" ]; then     echo radownload [url or .ram file] file.ra   else     mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile $2 $1   fi } function ra2wav {   if [ "$1" = "--help" ]; then     echo ra2wav file.ra file.wav   else     mplayer -ao pcm:file=$2 -vc dummy -vo null $1   fi }

  3. Start up a new shell and convert away:

    % radownload rtsp://www.suckysite.com/media/foo.rm audio.ra
    % ra2wav audio.ra audio.wav

Adapting the instructions for Windows is left as an exercise for the reader.