How to save real audio files to hard disk

I published a stream ripping tutorial yesterday and one of the comments that I have received was if I knew a way to save real audio music as well to the computer. After a bit of fiddling around I found a solution that lets you save real audio music to your computer's hard drive.

You will need the following tools: Real Player, Real Player Alternative or another tool / plugin that plays real audio files. I suggest Real Player Alternative as it is lighter and not as bloated as the official tool.

There is more than one way to save the files. I try to give an overview on all of them, there are surely more out there but I think its sufficient if you know how to save them, no one needs more than 2-3 ways for the same process.

1. Go to a webpage that offers Real Audio Streams, they normally offer a link to a .ram file which you download. The .ram file only contains the link to the .ra / .rm file, and that's what we need. Remember the .ra file contains the audio, the .ram file the location of the audio file.

Download the .ram file and open it locally with a text editor. You should see a line with a link to the audio file. If you are lucky the url starts with http://

If that's the case simply copy paste the url into your browser and you are prompted to download the audio file.

Unfortunately most of the time the url does not start with http but with rtsp:// for example. The browser won't download this files, there is a workaround for this though. Just a quick note, there is an older format as well, just in case, don't worry if you find a pnm:// link, its just the old protocol. There should not be a lot of those around anymore.

You can use the flashget program to which is a download manager to save streams, it is able to handle the rtsp:// format as well as others.

Once on your hard disk simply double click to start the audio file. I suggest a player like AIMP or VLC Media Player for that.

Advertisement