When I was working at Democracy Now we had a few pieces of audio that  
only existing as Real Audio streams on remote servers. We used mplayer  
with the -dumpstream option, worked well and fast, allowed us to  
retain the original without transcoding. It's free and works as a  
command line tool on many platforms.

mplayer -v -dumpstream rtsp://path/to/file.rm

David Rice

On Jan 29, 2009, at 5:24 PM, Mike Richter wrote:

> Jim Sam wrote:
>> All,
>> Does any one have a favorite program for converting real audio, or  
>> any real media, to a non-proprietary format, such as wav?
>> I'm asking in the spirit of being able to adequately preserve  
>> future acquisitions of archives.
>
> Though I've not used it for that purpose, the Swiss army knife of A/ 
> V converters is SuperC (the 'C' being the copyright symbol) from  
> eRightSoft. Unfortunately, they make one struggle to find the  
> download and the program is so powerful that it can be difficult to  
> set up, but I believe it will do the job. It is freeware, so you  
> risk only your time to try it - and we all have a great deal of that  
> on hand, of course. <G>
>
> Mike
> -- 
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