Utility to convert Real Audio files to other format?

Factual Questions
1

Here’s the deal: I have some Real Audio files of news broadcasts in Tamil that I’m looking to convert to a format playable by a audio CD player so we can use them as practice in class. (These are public domain news broadcasts, copyright will not be infringed by my doing this.)

I know that I have to rip the .ram files to something playable by a CD player, but I’m not sure which format to convert them to or which utility is the best. Anyone had any experience doing this

As always, opinions are appreciated.

2

A search for “realaudio to wav” brings up many such programs.

If you can’t find a program that works, try a tool like TotalRecorder, which will record all audio going through your soundcard. If you can play it, you can record it.

3

You’ll need to decode them to regular .wav files, which can then be converted by your CD burner application into CD Digital Audio format. They should, given a proper decoder, sound almost as good as the original files. Beware, if you try to convert them into a format such as MP3, you will have SUBSTANTIAL quality loss.

4

But surely if you can already decode them into WAV’s, then the quaility loss for MP3’s is purely dependant on the bit rate you encode them into and how good your ear is. Most people cant tell a 128 - 192 Kb/s MP3 from a CD and nearly everybody cant tell the difference when you go above 320 Kb/s. Hell, this is a radio broadcast involving speech only, you could probably still get acceptable quality from 32Kb/s

5

Shalmanese: The problem is an effect called “cascading.” This is what happens when you compress anything using lossy compression multiple times. If you were to make a 320kbps MP3 of a song, it might sound identical to the original. But if you reencode the 320kbps MP3 to 128kbps, and make a straight 128kbps encoding from the source, the reencoded 128kbps MP3 will sound significantly worse than the 128kbps MP3 made from the source. This effect is exaggerated the more compressed the file you are reencoding is.

Also, just to clarify, in my above post when I said that the decoded WAV will sound “nearly as good as the original file,” I meant the RealAudio file, not the original source. The quality will be degraded somewhat by conversion to 44.1khz samplerate, but the effect shouldn’t be TOO bad.