I've been slacking lately, but for good reason! I'm really, amazingly, incredibly, mind-numbingly busy right now. And I've got a lot of stuff to get done too. So as a sort of peace offering I offer you this little how-to, entirely adopted from a comment on Richard Dawkins' site by benh. Personally, I find this very handy. I hate RealAudio for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because it won't play on my mp3 player (which does a number of formats).

This one's for you Linux geeks, though you Mac heads should have no problem either. It could be done on Windows, but for the purpose of this how-to I'm going to assume you've got some form of *BSD/*nix and both mplayer and lame installed. Start out by opening up terminal window and then...

1. Obtain the stream URL
   
   • wget http://URL_of_realaudio_program/filename.ram
   • cat filename.ram (benh suggests using vi to edit the file, but just cat'ing it to STDOUT should work fine)
   Copy the line beginning with rtsp
2. Download the stream using mplayer
   
   • mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://the_stream_url_copied_above
3. Once the stream is downloaded, convert it to a wav file
   
   • mplayer -ao pcm stream.dump
4. Once this is complete, you will have a file called audiodump.wav in your working directory, to convert this to an mp3 you will need a program called LAME.
   
   • lame --preset standard ./audiodump.wav ./filename.mp3

And that's all there is to it. Thanks to benh for concise and clear instructions. A great workaround to a truly inconvenient audio format!

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