[Empeg-general] Re: Ripping Real Audio files to MP3

[Tony Fabris]

The people at RealNetworks would prefer that we don't do this.

When you see a website with a streaming RealAudio file, usually it'll be made deliberately so that you can't download the file to your hard disk. There's a certain kind of RealAudio file that can be saved to the hard disk, but unless they've specifically made that kind of file in the first place, it's next to impossible to save a stream.

There's gotta be a way, though, right? I mean, the data's coming down and is buffered on your computer for audio playback, so there's gotta be a way to save it. Well, there's a couple of ways to do it.

The official, recommended way, and the way that I'm going to tell you about here, is to use a product called "Total Recorder" to do the work. It will intercept any digital audio being sent to your sound card and turn it into ordinary wave data that you're free to encode in any way you like. It is a very good program and should be in everyone's audio tool kit.

There are also programs which will masquerade as a RealPlayer client and save streamed audio to the hard disk, as well as programs that will decode these streamed files into wave data. However, they are not publicly available because they violate RealNetworks' patents. I will not recommend them to you.