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!

tng's blog

CDex screenshot: A free CD ripper based on LAME for WindowsI just wanted to take a couple of minutes and point out an informative post at one of the best music blogs around, The Sky Moves Sideways.

If you're at all like me then chances are you have a absolutely ginormous digital music collection. All ripped from CDs you've paid for out of your own pocket and have full rights to make copies of for your personal enjoyment, right? Right!? Of course you do. Anyhow, BlackWatchPlaid tells you what software to use to not only rip your CDs so they sound their best, but also how to make your digital media collection look good too.

The recommendations are Windows centric, but Mac and Linux users probably already know how to do this anyway. Well, the Linux users likely do. I don't know about you Mac people. Be sure to read the comments for even more great tips.

tng's blog