Download MP3s using RealPlayer--or avoiding it?

Macfury · Feb 20th, 2012, 11:43 AM

I promised to download these air checks for a friend:

Rock Radio Scrapbook: The CKLW Years (Part 1)

But then discovered that they were formatted to play in that hideous piece of malware, Realplayer. I downloaded the thing, including RealPlayer Downloader, but it seems attuned to grabbing only YouTube videos--not MP3 audio. Any idea as to how I can grab these files?

I still have a last resort that will simply record anything that is heard on my computer, but that's pretty time consuming.

johnnyspade · Feb 20th, 2012, 12:05 PM

Boy, I haven't seen real media files in awhile. Assuming you can just right click to download the .ram file, what about a converter for transferring the .ram to .mp3 or something more user friendly?

Macfury · Feb 20th, 2012, 12:10 PM

The .ram files don't have content in them as far as I can tell--they're just links to the content. And the RP Downloader only wants to download video files.

eMacMan · Feb 20th, 2012, 12:20 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by Macfury
	I promised to download these air checks for a friend: Rock Radio Scrapbook: The CKLW Years (Part 1) But then discovered that they were formatted to play in that hideous piece of malware, Realplayer.....

I would say that is an overly restrained understatement.

Vaguely seem to recall that you had to register and pay for RP in order to do anything but stream files. Was delighted when Car Talk switched to another format and I could ditch RP entirely.

Best bet would be to let Wiretap or something similar do its thing while you eat dinner.

johnnyspade · Feb 20th, 2012, 04:28 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by Macfury
	The .ram files don't have content in them as far as I can tell--they're just links to the content. And the RP Downloader only wants to download video files.

Ah, gotcha. Try opening that .ram file in TextEdit. That should give you the link to an .rm file that you can actually download. From there, you could play in VLC or convert the file if you have an audio converter of some type.

Tech Elementz · Feb 20th, 2012, 04:52 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by johnnyspade
	You could play [them] in VLC

I actually found a way of turning these RAM files into MP3...

Download the RAM file and play them in VLC 2.0.

Seeing as I don't know if this feature exists in other older versions, just download and use VLC 2.0.

Go to File > Streaming/Exporting Wizard. Then click on Transcode/Save to file.

Click on the existing player and click on the URL of the RAM file.

Click on Transcode audio and choose MP3 as the codec and choose the bitrate.

The rest of the steps seem self-explanatory and you'll get the process.

UPDATE: I noticed that the actual file comes out to an mpg file which only seems to play in QuickTime. Perhaps you'll need to convert this file to mp3.

UPDATE 2: If you use something such as Miro Video Converter to convert the mpg file into MP3, it should work and become an mp3. It's a lengthy process [if you dont have miro video converter installed], but you should be able to get these ram files into mp3 with this process.

Hope this helps you out...

andreww · Feb 20th, 2012, 05:03 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by johnnyspade
	Ah, gotcha. Try opening that .ram file in TextEdit. That should give you the link to an .rm file that you can actually download. From there, you could play in VLC or convert the file if you have an audio converter of some type.

The ram file just links to the url. when you try to access that page it just downloads the ram file again, which seems to be nothing but a 50k link. Doesn't seem to be any way to get to the page where the audio file is actually hosted.

Tech Elementz · Feb 20th, 2012, 07:59 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by andreww
	The ram file just links to the url. when you try to access that page it just downloads the ram file again, which seems to be nothing but a 50k link. Doesn't seem to be any way to get to the page where the audio file is actually hosted.

This RAM file is very interesting. This website should be updated at the very least to include MP3 downloads from a file sharing website... To get these ram files to MP3 is quite annoying [I posted a small tutorial before hand...]

johnnyspade · Feb 20th, 2012, 11:07 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by andreww
	The ram file just links to the url. when you try to access that page it just downloads the ram file again, which seems to be nothing but a 50k link. Doesn't seem to be any way to get to the page where the audio file is actually hosted.

The .ram file is just a link container. If you open this file in a text editor - http://rockradioscrapbook.ca/cklw-jinglemontage.ram - you will see that it contains the .rm link. Download that and convert it to whatever you like. In fact it looks like if you just rename all the files they link to from .ram to .rm they'll download fine.

Each 10 minute audio file looks to be no more than that 1-2 MB. I just converted one to .mp3 with no issues: cklw-jinglemontage.mp3

Tech Elementz · Feb 21st, 2012, 06:18 AM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by johnnyspade
	The .ram file is just a link container. If you open this file in a text editor - http://rockradioscrapbook.ca/cklw-jinglemontage.ram - you will see that it contains the .rm link. Download that and convert it to whatever you like. In fact it looks like if you just rename all the files they link to from .ram to .rm they'll download fine. Each 10 minute audio file looks to be no more than that 1-2 MB. I just converted one to .mp3 with no issues: cklw-jinglemontage.mp3

This would probably be easier...