cmdrdata said:
There is this funny program on PBS called Car Talk, but I seemed to be
nowhere near a radio when it is on. They also make the show available
on-line and I can hear the program as Real Audio stream. What I'd like
to do is being able to:
1. go the cartalk website, and download the .ram file,
2. convert it to mp3 and
3. load it to my mp3 player
I can then listen to it when it is convenient to do so, like when I am
driving somewhere... or when mowing the lawn
Whats the best freeware that I can use to accomplish this task? Thank
for your help.
(PS: I downloaded stationripper that was recent;y posted, but cannot
get it to work/capture the info).
First, it helps to understand what the Real Networks' technology is all
about.
Real Audio is designed to download _only_ streams in _real time_ from a
_live_ web connection. The purpose is to "serve" you with fresh
third-party advertising content with every play. This is the core of
Real's financial model: they are in the advertising business. The entire
focus of Real Networks is to get advertising into your brain. Their
technology is optimized to do this. And so is their gargantuan program,
Real Player, which takes over your computer and turns it into an
advertising box under their control -- an advertising box that you paid
for and that you maintain. This is how they support their enterprise and
take home a profit.
The system is designed to prevent you from downloading content to your
hard disk -- for if you were able to do this, you would avoid being
freshly "served" with advertising under Real's control. There are times
when you seem to be offered the ability to save a Real file. That's not
what you get. What you save is actually just a link for a fresh
real-time download, which will come with new advertising feeds. The last
thing that they want you to do is to convert their encoded content into
an MP3 file.
There is at least one third-party program that can intercept the audio
and save it as an ordinary computer audio file. I believe that it is
freeware. Obviously, it's got to stash the data from a real-time 1:1
stream. In other words, if Car Talk runs for one hour, your computer
will have to be downloading the show for a full one hour.
At some point, the data is converted into an analog audio signal inside
your computer. At that point, the sound is no longer under Real's
control and once the data has passed that portal, it's yours to do
whatever you want with it. However, note that it's analog and not digital.
I enjoy Car Talk also. It's the funniest program in American radio. I
only listen to radio if it's time-shifted; I play back the material on a
walk-thing. In the case of Car Talk, I record it live on a setup that
starts recording on cassette tape from an electric timer. For other
public radio shows, I download the Real streams from the computer into a
cassette recorder. You can do the same thing.
I figure that I'm going to have to change to digital for all this. My
suitable cassette equipment will only last so long. It's even getting
hard to find the C-120 cassettes that'll hold an uninterrupted hour. And
I hate Sony tape cassettes as much as I do their CDR disks. So that's a
brand that I won't buy -- it makes the pickin's even slimmer.
I think that Real Networks invented a useful technology: this business
of sending an on-demand audio stream down the internet was extremely
tricky to work out and probably represents a large invesemtment. The
technology is pretty complicated. The reason for the strange
cell-phone-type distorted sound is part of the tradeoff. Like MP3, I
find it OK for speech. For music, Real is unacceptable, and MP3 is fine
for rock music, not good enough for classical.
Comments from the hoy palloy are welcome!!!
Richard
