Simon said:
I will shortly be going on a long air trip and I thought it would be a good
idea to download a number of radio programmes from the BBC web site and
listen again as they say. Unfortunately I cannot see how it is possible to
transfer from a .ram file to .mp3 file to listen on the player rather than
realplayer. Can some one point me in the right direction of software to
enable me to carry this function out.
Many thanks
Simon
I just bought an MP3 player to take the place of a tape recorder. I
download US public radio programs almost all of which are streamed in
Real format, which, as you wrote, is what The Beeb uses exclusively.
Real's technology is such that the signal arrives at the computer in
digital form, but it's almost impossible to get it through the computer
and out the other end in any form other than analog. This is intentional
on Real's part.
The routine is surprisingly easy: The device came with an audio
patchcord -- a cord that has the same standard plug at each end. This
plug is known by various names: 1/8" phone plug, stereo mini earphone
plug, and a term that I think that I invented: a Sony plug (they were
the first to use it for tape recorder microphones).
I connect the cable to the computer's sound output jack at one end, and
plug it into the MP3 player at the other end. So, the transfer is done
as pure analog audio between the devices. The player encodes the audio
into MP3 automatically. My MP3 player allows the user to select the
compression intensity. For spoken word radio, that compression could be
pretty severe before it would be noticed, so a lot of radio programs
could be carried on the player's memory chip. You can use this method to
record _any_ sound regardless of format. In fact, the quality of the
show I'm listening to right now done this way is excellent.
I "cheated" by making an "audio breakout box" that's inserted between
the computer and the amplified speakers -- allowing me to tap into the
audio stream without unplugging anything. You can buy plastic gizmo
that's pretty similar -- I think that I've seen this sold under the GE
brand (actually, the GE logo used under license by a marketing company).
How does this sound to you?
Richard
