q. How do I easily convert realaudio to mp3 on linux?

a. I've found the following works quite well. You need to have mplayer installed with the correct win32 codecs on your system (On my system they are kept in /usr/lib/win32/). You likely won't get these with your distro for licensing reasons but http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/ will have them. For realaudio you really only need those codecs but you might want to grab the 'all' or 'essential' package if you use mplayer regularly. Then it's a case of: mplayer -ao pcm -aofile output.wav input.ra to change the file to a wave., and then lame output.wav to encode to mp3. This should work with ra or rm. In the case of some audio streams like the BBC's listen again streams you may find you need to edit the wave file using a wave editor of some kind to remove excess chatter from the start and end of the file. The BBC automate these recordings so there is usually the end of the previous program or the start of the next on the streams.

Labels: file manipulation