q. How do I convert streaming real audio to mp3?

a. If possible download the .ram file by right-clicking on the audio link and selecting save-as, and open it in a text editor of some kind. Even less from the command line should do. eg: less stream.ram. Then paste the full contents (which should be an address beginning with rtsp://) to mplayer. eg: mplayer -ao pcm:file=output.wav rtsp://input.address/file . mplayer should then just play the stream silently and output the sound to a wave file called output.wav. This may take a while depending on the length of the audio stream. There may be a way to speed this up I don't know about yet.

Once it is done you should be able to run: lame output.wav to make an mp3. You can also stipulate the bitrate on the command line eg: lame -b64 output.wav if you want a lower bitrate file since real-audio streams are usually of low quality anyway encoding at 128 or higher is usually just a waste of diskspace. Ultimately you'll want an mp3 the same size or smaller than the source RealMedia file.

Labels: file manipulation