I am about to buy an MP3 player (the Sonicblue Rio S35.) Is there any way to convert Real Audio files to MP3 format, or play them raw, or something? Specifically, I’d like to listen to the archived broadcasts of Cartalk and Prairie Home Companion and the like, all of which are available on the web. Any help or advice would be much appreciated.
The official answer is “no.” Streaming media is like radio - they can provide it for free because it’s for one-time listening. If you want to own a recording you’re supposed to pay for it. So there is no official software that can save a RealAudio stream on your PC. Audible sells audio files of many audiobooks and radio shows, but it’s not cheap and it’s in a propriatory copy-protected format. If your MP3 player doesn’t support this format, you’re out of luck.
Unofficially, I hear there are some programs that capture RealAudio streams and save it onto disk. I’ve never used them so I can’t comment on that.
Ah, but you can! There is a plugin to play saved RealAudio files in Winamp. And once you do that, I believe you can use the waveout writer to write it out to a wav file. I have a batch of ancient, archival recordings from the 1910’s and 1920’s in Realaudio that I play with Winamp.
Search for “Innover’s RealAudio Plugin for Winamp”, version 1.6.
Alternately, there are RealAudio to MP3/Wav converters out there that do the same thing, with a few more steps.
But how do you save the stream as a RealAudio file? On most web sites with streaming audio, if you right-click on the “Listen with RealAudio” link and select SAVE it just saves a tiny file with a link in it, not the actual data.
You are completely correct. But I thought the OP might be referring to saved RA files (*.ra files, which you can do if you have the full, licensed version of RealAudio), not just streaming ones. I have seen shareware programs that claim to take streams and write them as wavs/MP3s, but their performance has been abyssmal, IMO.